Personalitj 


American 
Cities 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNrA 
tJAVIS 


From  an  ttchine  by  E.    Hvrfer 

MADISON  SQUARE,  NEW  YORK 


THE   PERSONALITY 

=====   OF  ======1 

AMERICAN    CITIES 


BY 

EDWARD    HUNGERFORD 

Author  of  "The  Modern  Railroad," 
"Gertrude"  etc. 


WITH  FRONTISPIECE  BY 

E.  HORTER 


NEW  YORK 

McBRIDE,  NAST  &  COMPANY 
19*3 


LIBRARY 

OR  TALIFORNIA 


Copyright,     1913,     by 
McBRiDE,  NAST  &  Co. 

Second  Printing 
January,  1914 


Published   November,  1913 


TO 

MY  LITTLE  DAUGHTER 
ADRIENNE 


PREFACE 

The  author  bespeaks  his  thanks  to  the  magazine  edi 
tors  who  were  gracious  enough  to  permit  him  to  include 
portions  of  his  articles  from  their  pages.  He  wishes 
particularly  to  thank  for  their  generous  assistance  in 
the  preparation  of  this  book,  R.  C.  Ellsworth,  and  Crom 
well  Childe  of  New  York ;  C.  Armand  Miller,  D.D.,  of 
Philadelphia;  Nat  Olds,  formerly  of  Rochester;  Edwin 
Baxter  of  Cleveland ;  and  Victor  Ross  of  Toronto.  With 
out  their  aid  it  is  conceivable  that  the  book  would  not 
have  come  into  its  being.  And  having  aided  it,  they 
must  be  content  to  be  known  as  its  foster  fathers. 

E.  H. 
Brooklyn,  New  York,  September,  1913. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

1.  OUR  ANCIENT  HUB i 

2.  AMERICA'S  NEW  YORK 17 

3.  ACROSS  THE  EAST  RIVER 61 

4.  WILLIAM  PENN'S  TOWN 76 

5.  THE  MONUMENTAL  CITY 95 

6.  THE  AMERICAN  MECCA 108 

7.  THE  CITY  OF  THE  SEVEN  HILLS 127 

8.  WHERE  ROMANCE  AND  COURTESY  DO  NOT  FOR 

GET  135 

9.  ROCHESTER  —  AND  HER  NEIGHBORS     .     .     .153 

10.  STEEL'S  GREAT  CAPITAL 171 

11.  THE  SIXTH  CITY 185 

12.  CHICAGO  —  AND  THE  CHICAGOANS  ....   198 

13.  THE  TWIN  CITIES 212 

14.  THE  GATEWAY  OF  THE  SOUTHWEST.     .     .     .  225 

15.  THE  OLD  FRENCH  LADY  BY  THE  RIVERBANK  .  236 

16.  THE  CITY  OF  THE  LITTLE  SQUARES.     .     .     .  256 

17.  THE  AMERICAN  PARIS 266 

18.  Two  RIVALS  OF  THE  NORTH  PACIFIC  — AND  A 

THIRD 280 

19.  SAN  FRANCISCO  —  THE  NEWEST  PHCENIX  .     .  288 

20.  BELFAST  IN  AMERICA 3°7 

21.  WHERE  FRENCH  AND  ENGLISH  MEET  .     .     .  318 

22.  THE  CITY  THAT  NEVER  GROWS  YOUNG  .     .     .  332 


THE  ILLUSTRATIONS 

Madison   Square,   New  York    ....     Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

Tremont  Street,  Boston 2 

Park  Street,  Boston 10 

The   Brooklyn   Bridge 18 

View  of  New  York  from  a  Skyscraper  ....     30 

Washington  Square,  New  York 46 

A  Quiet  Street  on  Brooklyn  Heights 64 

An  old  Brooklyn  Homestead 72 

City  Hall,  Philadelphia 84 

In    Baltimore    Harbor 96 

Charles  Street,  Baltimore 102 

The  Union  Station,  Washington 114 

The   Capitol 122 

St.  Michael's  Churchyard,  Charleston 146 

The  Erie  Canal,  in  Rochester 154 

A  Home  in  Rochester 160 

Syracuse  —  the  canal 168 

The   waterfront,   Pittsburgh 180 

One  of  Cleveland's  broad  avenues 192 

Michigan  Avenue  and  lake-front,  Chicago   .      .      .   204 

The  River  at  St.  Paul 220 

Entrance  to  the  University,  St.  Louis 226 

A  home  in  the  newer  St.  Louis 232 

A  street  scene  in  the  Creole  Quarter  —  New  Orleans  244 
The  big  cathedral,  San  Antonio 256 


THE  ILLUSTRATIONS 


FACING 
PACK 


San  Juan  Mission,  San  Antonio 262 

The  arch  at  I7th  Street,  Denver 270 

Seattle,  Puget  Sound  and  the  Olympics  ....  282 

Where  the  Pacific  rolls  up  to  San  Francisco  .      .      .  294 

The  Mission  Dolores,  San  Francisco 302 

A  Church  parade  in  Montreal 320 

Looking  from  the  Terrace  into  Lower  Quebec  .      .  334 

Four  Brethren  upon  the  Terrace 340 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
AMERICAN  CITIES 


2       PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

tonian  is  occasionally  rude ;  these  occasions  are  almost  in 
variably  upon  his  overcrowded  streets  and  in  the  public 
places  —  until  the  stranger  may  begin  to  wonder  if,  after 
all,  the  street  railroad  employes  have  a  monopoly  of  good 
manners  —  but  he  is  always  just.  His  mind  is  judicial. 
He  treats  you  fairly.  And  if  he  knows  you,  knows  your 
forbears  as  well,  he  is  courtesy  of  the  highest  sort.  And 
there  is  no  hospitality  in  the  land  to  be  compared  with 
Boston  hospitality  —  once  you  have  been  admitted  to  its 
portals. 

So  we  have  come  in  this  second  decade  of  the  twen 
tieth  century  to  speak  of  the  inner  cult  of  the  Boston 
folk  as  Brahmins.  The  term  is  not  new.  But  in  the 
whole  land  there  is  not  one  better  applied.  For  almost 
as  the  high  caste  of  mystic  India  hold  themselves  aloof 
from  even  the  mere  sight  of  less  favored  humans,  do 
these  great,  somber  houses  of  Beacon  street  and  the  rest 
of  the  Back  Bay  close  their  doors  tightly  to  the  stranger. 
Make  no  mistake  as  to  this  very  thing.  You  rarely  read 
of  Boston  society  —  her  Brahmin  caste  —  in  the  columns 
of  her  newspapers.  There  are,  of  course,  distinguished 
Boston  folk  whose  names  ring  there  many  times  —  a 
young  girl  who  through  her  athletic  triumphs  and  her 
sane  fashion  of  looking  at  life  forms  a  good  example  for 
her  sisters  across  the  land;  a  brilliant  broker,  with  an 
itching  for  printer's  ink,  who  places  small  red  devils 
upon  his  stationery;  a  society  matron  who  must  always 
\  sit  in  the  same  balcony  seat  at  the  Symphony  concerts, 
.  and  who  houses  in  her  eccentric  Back  Bay  home  perhaps 
"%he  finest  private  art  gallery  in  America.  These  folk 
and  many  others  of  their  sort  head  the  so-called  "  So 
ciety  columns  "  of  the  Sunday  newspapers.  But  the  real 
Bostonese  do  not  run  to  outre  stationery  or  other  eccen 
tricities.  They  live  within  the  tight  walls  of  their  som 
ber,  simple,  lovely  old  red-brick  houses,  and  thank  God 
that  there  were  days  that  had  the  names  of  Winthrop 


Boston's  Via  Sacre— Tremont  Street— and  Park 
Street  church 


BOSTON 


3 


or  Cabot  or  Adams  or  Peabody  spelled  in  tinted  letters 
along  the  horizon. 

A.  M.  Howe,  who  knows  his  Boston  thoroughly,  once 
told  of  two  old  ladies  there  who  always  quarreled  as 
to  which  should  have  the  first  look  at  the  Transcript  each 
evening. 

"  I  want  to  see  if  anybody  nice  has  died  in  the 
Transcript  this  evening,"  the  older  sister  would  say  as 
she  would  hear  the  thud  of  the  paper  against  the  stout 
outer  door, —  and  after  that  the  battle  was  on. 

We  always  had  suspected  Mr.  Howe  of  going  rather 
far  in  this,  until  we  came  to  the  facts.  It  seems  that 
there  were  two  old  ladies  in  Cambridge,  which  —  as  every 
one  ought  to  know,  is  a  sort  of  scholastic  annex  to  Bos 
ton  —  and  that  they  never  quarreled  —  save  on  the  matter 
of  the  first  possession  of  the  Transcript.  On  that  vexed 
question  they  never  failed  to  disagree.  The  matter  was 
brought  to  the  attention  of  the  owners  of  the  news 
paper —  and  they  settled  it  by  sending  an  extra  copy  of 
the  Transcript  each  evening,  with  their  compliments. 
And  that  could  not  have  happened  anywhere  else  in  this 
land  save  on  the  shores  of  Massachusetts  Bay. 

Yet  these  old  Bostonians  the  chance  visitor  to  the  city 
rarely,  if  ever,  sees.  They  are  conspicuous  by  their 
very  absence.  He  will  not  find  them  lunching  in  the 
showy  restaurants  of  the  Touraine  or  in  its  newest  com 
petitor  farther  up  Boylston  street.  They  shrink.  He 
may  sometime  catch  a  glimpse  of  a  patrician  New  Eng 
land  countenance  behind  the  window-glass  of  a  carriage- 
door,  or  even  see  the  Brahmins  quietly  walking  home 
from  church  through  the  sacred  streets  of  the  Back  Bay 
on  a  Sunday  morning,  but  that  is  all.  The  doors  of  the 
old  houses  upon  those  streets  are  tightly  closed  upon 
him. 

But  if  one  of  those  doors  will  open  ever  and  ever  so 
tiny  a  crack  to  him,  it  will  open  full-wide,  with  the  gen- 


4       PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

erous  width  of  New  England  hospitality,  and  bid  him 
enter.  We  remember  dining  in  one  of  these  famous 
old  houses  two  or  three  seasons  ago.  It  was  in  the 
heart  of  winter  —  a  Boston  winter  —  and  the  night  was 
capriciously  changing  from  rain  to  sleet  and  sleet  to 
rain  again.  The  wind  blew  in  from  the  sea  with  that 
piercing  sharpness,  so  characteristic  of  Boston.  It  bent 
the  bare  branches  of  the  old  trees  upon  the  Common,  sent 
swinging  overhead  signs  to  creaking  and  shrieking  in  their 
misery,  played  sad  havoc  with  unwary  umbrellas,  and 
shot  the  flares  from  the  bracketed  gas-lamps  along  the 
streets  into  all  manner  of  fanciful  forms.  In  such  a 
storm  we  made  our  way  through  streets  of  solid  brick 
houses  up  the  hill  to  the  famous  Bulfinch  State  House  and 
then  down  again  through  Mount  Vernon  street  and  Lou- 
isburg  square  —  highways  that  once  properly  flattened 
might  have  been  taken  from  Mayfair  or  Belgravia. 
Finally  our  path  led  to  a  little  street,  boasting  but  eight 
of  the  stolid  brick  houses  and  arranged  in  the  form  of 
a  capital  T.  The  shank  of  the  T  gave  that  little  colony 
its  sole  access  to  the  remainder  of  the  world. 

To  one  of  these  eight  old  houses  —  an  austere  fellow 
and  the  product  of  an  austere  age  —  we  were  asked. 
When  its  solid  door  closed  behind  us,  we  were  in 
another  Boston.  Not  that  the  interior  of  the  house  be 
lied  its  stolid  front.  It  was  as  simple  as  yellow  tintings 
and  bare  walls  might  ever  be.  But  the  few  pieces  of 
furniture  that  were  scattered  through  the  generous  rooms 
were  real  furniture,  mahogany  of  a  sort  that  one  rarely 
ever  sees  in  shops  or  auction-rooms,  the  canvases  that 
occasionally  relieved  those  bare  walls  were  paintings  that 
would  have  graced  even  sizeable  public  collections.  The 
dinner  was  simple  —  compared  with  New  York  stand 
ards —  but  the  hospitality  was  generous,  even  still  com 
pared  with  the  standards  of  New  York.  To  that  infor 
mal  dinner  had  been  bidden  a  group  of  Boston  men  and 


BOSTON  5 

women  fairly  representative  of  the  town,  a  Harvard  pro 
fessor  of  real  renown,  the  editor  of  an  influential  daily 
newspaper,  a  barrister  of  national  reputation,  a  sociol 
ogist  whose  heart  has  gone  toward  her  work  and  made 
that  work  successful.  These  folk,  exquisite  in  their 
poise  because  of  their  absolute  simplicity,  discussed  the 
issues  of  the  moment  —  the  city's  progress  in  the  play 
ground  movement,  the  possibilities  of  minimum  wage 
laws,  the  tragic  devotion  of  Mrs.  Pankhurst  and  her 
daughter  to  woman  suffrage.  In  New  York  a  similar 
group  of  folk  similarly  gathered  would  have  discussed 
the  newest  and  most  elaborate  of  hotels  or  George  M. 
Cohan's  latest  show. 

It  is  this  very  quality  that  makes  Boston  so  different 
—  and  so  delightful.  She  may  look  like  a  cleanly  Lon 
don,  as  she  often  boasts  —  with  her  sober  streets  of  red 
brick  —  and  yet  she  still  remains,  despite  the  great  / 
changes  that  have  come  to  pass  in  the  character  of  her 
people  within  the  past  dozen  years  —  a  really  American 
town.  A  few  hours  of  study  of  the  faces  upon  the 
streets  and  in  the  public  conveyances  will  confirm  this. 
And  perhaps  it  is  this  very  fact  that  makes  a  certain,  well- 
known  resident  of  the  Middle  West  come  to  Boston  once 
or  twice  each  year  without  any  purpose  than  his  own 
announced  one  of  dwelling  for  a  few  days  within  a 
"  really  civilized  community." 

We  well  remember  our  first  visit  to  Boston  some  — 
twenty  years  ago.  We  came  over  the  Boston  &  Albany 
railroad  down  into  the  old  station  in  Kneeland  street. 
For  it  was  before  the  day  that  those  two  mammoth  and 
barnlike  terminals,  the  North  and  the  South  stations, 
had  been  built.  In  those  days  the  railroad  stations  of 
Boston  expressed  more  than  a  little  of  her  personality  — 
even  the  dingy  ark  of  the  Boston  &  Maine  which  thrust 
itself  out  ahead  of  all  its  competitors  along  Causeway 


8       PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

bany  "  is  reappearing  upon  whole  brigades  of  engines  and 
regiments  of  freight  and  passenger  cars.  A  friendly 
sentiment,  reared  in  traditions,  has  not  been  slow  to  show 
its  appreciation  of  the  act  of  the  railroad  in  New  York. 
And  the  men  in  charge  of  the  great  consolidation  of  the 
other  railroads  east  of  the  Hudson  river  have  not  been 
slow  to  follow  in  their  action.  They  have  announced  that 
they  plan  to  build  their  railroads  into  one  great  system 
called  the  "  New  England  Lines."  It  begins  to  look  as 
if,  after  all  these  years,  they  have  begun  to  read  the 
Boston  mind. 

We  have  strayed  far  from  our  text  —  from  our  long 
ago  early  visit  to  Boston.  Our  first  impression  of  the 
town  then  came  from  a  policeman  whom  we  saw  in  the 
old  Kneeland  street  station.  The  policeman  had  white 
side-whiskers  and  he  wore  gold-bowed  spectacles.  We 
have  never,  either  before  or  after  our  first  arrival  in  Bos 
ton,  seen  a  policeman  adorned,  either  simultaneously  or 
separately,  with  white  "  mutton-chops  "  or  gold-bowed 
spectacles,  and  so  it  was  that  this  Bostonian  made  a  dis 
tinct  impression.  Boston,  itself,  made  many  impressions. 
Twenty  years  ago  many  of  the  institutions  of  the  town 
that  have  since  disappeared,  still  remained.  True  it  is 
that  the  horse-cars  were  going  from  Tremont  street,  for 
the  first  of  the  diminutive  subways  that  have  kept  the  city 
years  ahead  of  most  American  towns  in  the  solution  of  her 
intra-urban  transportation  problems  had  been  completed 
and  was  a  nine-days'  marvel  to  the  land.  The  coldly  gray 
"  Christian  Science  Cathedral,"  with  its  wonderful  Sun 
day  congregations,  could  hardly  have  existed  then,  even 
as  a  dream  in  the  mind  of  its  founder.  And  the  Boston 
Museum  still  existed.  To  be  sure,  many  of  its  glories  in 
the  days  of  William  Warren  and  Annie  Clarke  had  dis 
appeared  and  it  was  doomed  a  few  months  later  to  such 
attractions  as  the  booking  syndicates  might  allot  it,  but 


BOSTON  9 

its  row  of  exterior  lamps  still  blazed  in  Tremont  street : 
until  in  June,  1903,  it  rang  down  its  green  baize  curtains 
and  closed  its  historic  doors  for  the  last  time. 

And  yet  Boston  has  not  changed  greatly  in  twenty  years 
—  not  in  outward  appearance  at  least.  When  she  builds 
anew  she  builds  with  reverent  regard  for  her  ideals  and 
her  past  traditions.  Her  architects  must  be  steeped  in 
both.  Nearly  twenty  years  ago  she  builded  her  first  sky 
scraper —  a  modest  and  dignified  affair  of  but  twelve 
stories  —  and  was  then  so  shocked  at  her  own  audacity 
that  she  promised  to  be  very,  very  good  for  ever  after 
and  never  to  do  anything  of  that  sort  again.  So  when 
she  found  that  a  new  hotel  going  up  near  Copley  Square 
had  overstepped  her  modest  limit  of  seven  stories  —  or  is 
it  eight  ?  —  she  showed  that  she  could  have  firmness  in 
her  determination.  She  chopped  the  cornice  and  the 
upper  story  boldly  off  the  new  hotel,  and  so  it  stands  to 
day,  as  if  someone  had  passed  a  giant  slicing-knife  cleanly 
over  the  structure. 

So  it  is  that  Boston  still  holds  to  her  attractive  sky 
line,  the  exquisite  composition  of  such  distinctive  thor 
oughfares  as  Park  street  from  the  fine  old  church  at 
Tremont  street  up  the  hill  to  Beacon  street,  the  pillared, 
yellow  front  of  the  old  State  House;  still  keeps  her 
meeting-houses  with  their  delicate  belfried  spires  stand 
ing  guard  upon  her  many  hilltops;  maintains  the  rich 
traditions  of  her  history  in  the  infinite  detail  of  her 
architecture  —  in  some  bit  of  wall  or  section  of  iron 
fence,  in  the  paneling  of  a  door,  the  set  of  a  cupola,  the 
thrust  of  a  street-lamp,  and  even  in  the  chimney-pots 
that  thrust  themselves  on  high  to  the  attention  of  the 
man  upon  the  pavement.  She  cherishes  her  memories. 
And  when  she  builds  anew  she  does  not  forget  her 
ideals. 

She  never  forgets  her  ideals.  And  if  at  times  they  may 
lead  her  to  regard  herself  a  bit  too  seriously,  they  make 


io      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

for  the  old  town  one  of  the  things  that  too  many  other 
American  towns  lack  —  a  real  and  distinctive  person 
ality.  For  instance,  take  her  public  houses,  her  taverns 
and  inns.  They  are  notable  in  the  fact  that  they  are 
distinctive  —  and  something  more.  In  a  day  and  age 
when  the  famous  American  hotels  of  other  days  and 
generations  and  the  things  for  which  they  stood,  have 
been  rather  forgotten  in  the  strife  to  imitate  a  certain 
type  of  New  York  skyscraper  hotel,  the  Boston  hotels 
still  stand  distinctive.  Not  that  the  New  York  type  of 
skyscraper  is  not  excellent.  It  must  have  had  its  strong 
points  to  have  been  so  copied  across  the  land.  But  if 
all  the  hotels  in  every  town,  big  and  little,  are  to  be  fash 
ioned  in  the  essentials  from  the  same  mold  what  is  to 
become  of  the  zest  for  travel?  You  travel  for  variety's 
sake,  otherwise  you  might  as  well  go  to  the  local  sky 
scraper  hotel  in  your  own  town  and  save  railroad  fare 
and  other  transportation  expenses. 

But  no  matter  what  may  be  true  of  other  towns,  the 
Boston  hotels  are  different.  "  I  like  the  Quincy  House 
for  its  sea-fud,"  said  an  old  legislator  from  Sandisfield 
more  than  forty  years  ago,  and  as  for  the  Tremont 
House,  turn  the  pages  of  your  "  American  Notes  "  and 
recall  the  praise  that  Charles  Dickens  gave  that  not-to-be- 
forgotten  hostelry.  It  was  one  of  the  very  few  things  in 
the  earlier  America  that  did  not  seem  to  excite  his  entire 
contempt. 

The  Tremont  House  has  gone  —  it  disappeared  under 
the  advance  of  modernity  in  the  serpent-like  guise  of  the 
first  subway  in  America,  creeping  down  in  front  of  it. 
But  other  hotels  of  the  old  Boston  remain  a'plenty,  the 
staid  Revere  House,  Parker's,  Young's,  the  Adams 
House, —  ages  seem  to  have  mellowed  but  not  lessened 
their  comforts  to  the  traveler.  Where  else  can  one  find 
a  catalogue  of  the  hotel  library  hanging  beside  his  dresser 
when  he  retires  to  the  privacy  of  his  room,  not  a  library 


BOSTON  ii 

crammed  with  "  best-sellers  "  like  these  itinerant  institu 
tions  on  the  limited  trains,  but  filled  with  real  books  of  a 
far  more  solid  sort  —  where  else  such  wisdom  on  tap 
in  a  tavern  —  but  Boston?  And  if  the  traveler  fails  to 
be  schooled  to  such  possibilities,  we  might  ask  where 
else  in  Christendom  can  he  get  boilgdjscrod,  or  Wash 
ington  pie,  or  fish  balls,  or  cod  tongiies  with  bacon,  or 
that  magna  charta  of  the  New  England  appetite,  that 
Plymouth  rock  from  which  has  come  all  the  virtues  of 
its  sturdy  folk,  baked  beans  with  brown  bread?  Eat- 
*£SJHJ^°^95JS  good.  In  these  things  it  is  superlative. 
And  it  is  pleasing  to  know  that  Boston's  newest  hotel  — 
the  Copley- Plaza  —  perhaps  the  finest  hotel  in  America, 
since  it  has  discarded  new-fashioned  details  for  the 
old  —  observes  the  traditions  of  the  town  in  which  it 
truly  earns  its  bread  and  butter. 

And  if  the  traveler  have  magic  sesame,  the  clubs  of 
the  old  town  may  open  to  him,  clubs  with  spotless  in 
tegrity  and  matchless  service,  all  the  way  from  the 
stately  Somerset  and  the  Algonquin  through  to  the  dem 
ocratic  City  Club  —  with  its  more  than  four  thousand 
enthusiastic  members.  This  last  is  perhaps  the  most 
representative  of  Boston  clubs.  Its  old  house  —  un 
fortunately  soon  to  be  vacated  —  stands  in  Beacon 
street,  within  a  stone's  throw  of  King's  Chapel  and  Tre- 
mont  street.  It  is  a  rare  old  house ;  two  houses  in  fact, 
lending  tenderly  to  the  Boston  traditions  of  delicate  bow 
fronts  and  severity  of  ornament.  Its  rooms  are  broad 
and  long  and  low,  filled  with  hospitable  tables  and  com 
fortable  Windsor  chairs.  In  its  great  fireplace  hickory 
logs  crackle  and  the  New  England  tradition  of  an  ash- 
bank  is  preserved  to  the  minutest  detail.  Its  dun-col 
ored  walls  are  lined  with  rare  prints  and  old  photographs 
—  pictures  for  the  most  part  of  that  old  Boston  which 
was  and  which  never  again  can  be.  The  dishes  that 
come  out  from  its  kitchen  are  from  the  best  of  tradi- 


12      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

tional  New  England  recipes.  And  as  your  host  leads 
you  out  from  the  dining-room  he  delves  deep  into  a 
barrel  and  brings  out  two  bright  red  apples.  He  hands 
you  one. 

"  We  New  England  folk  think  that  most  of  the  real 
virtues  of  life  are  seated  in  red  apples,"  he  says  —  and 
there  is  something  in  his  way  of  saying  it  that  makes  you 
believe  that  he  is  right. 

Another  day  and  he  may  lead  you  to  still  another  club 
—  this  one  down  under  the  roof  of  one  of  those  solid  old 
stone  warehouses  with  steep-pitched  roofs  that  thrust 
themselves  abruptly  out  into  the  harbor-line.  It  is  a 
yacht  club,  and  its  fortress-like  windows,  shaped  like  the 
port-holes  of  a  ship,  look  direct  to  a  brisk  water  highway 
to  the  open  sea.  Underneath  those  very  windows  is  the 
rush  and  turmoil  of  one  of  the  busiest  fish  markets  in 
the  land.  There  is  nothing  on  either  coast,  no,  not  even 
down  in  the  picturesque  Gulf  that  can  compare  with  this 
place,  which  reeks  with  the  odors  and  where  the  fisher 
men  handle  the  cod  with  huge  forks  and  paint  the  decks 
of  their  staunch  little  vessels  a  distinctive  color  to  show 
the  nationality  of  the  folk  who  man  it.  We  remember 
that  the  Portuguese  have  a  whimsical  fancy  for  painting 
the  decks  of  their  little  fishing  schooners  a  most  unusual 
blue. 

Of  Boston  harbor  an  entire  book  might  easily  be 
written  —  of  the  quaint  craft  that  still  tie  to  its  wharves, 
the  brave  show  of  shipping  that  passes  in  and  out  each 
day,  of  Boston  Light  and  that  other  silent,  watchful 
sentinel  which  stands  upon  Minot's  Ledge;  of  the  Navy 
Yard  over  in  Charlestown  at  which  the  Constitution, 
most  famous  of  all  fighting-ships,  rusts  out  her  fighting 
heart  through  the  long  years.  And  looking  down  upon 
that  old  Navy  Yard  from  Boston  itself  is  Copp's  Hill 
burying-ground,  a  rich  grubbing-place  for  the  seekers  of 
epitaphs  and  of  genealogical  lore.  We  remember  once 


BOSTON  13 

winning  the  heart  of  the  keeper  of  the  old  cemetery  and 
of  being  permitted  to  descend  to  the  vault  of  one  of  the 
oldest  of  Boston  families.  In  the  dark  place  there  were 
three  little  groups  of  bones  and  we  knew  that  only  three 
persons  had  been  buried  there. 

Above,  the  sunshine  beat  merrily  down  upon  Copp's 
Hill,  with  its  headstones  arranged  in  neat  rows  along 
the  tidy  paths  and  the  elevated  trains  in  an  encircling 
street  fairly  belying  the  bullets  in  the  stones  —  shot 
there  from  Bunker  Hill  a  century  and  a  quarter  be 
fore.  .  .  .  There  are  many  other  such  burying-grounds 
in  Boston  —  in  the  very  heart  of  the  city  the  Granary 
and  King's  Chapel  burying-ground  where  a  great  owl 
sometimes  comes  at  dusk  and  opens  his  eyes  wide 
at  the  traffic  of  a  great  city  encircling  one  of  God's 
acres.  And  a  soul  that  revels  in  these  things  will,  per 
chance,  journey  to  Salem,  seventeen  miles  distant,  and 
see  the  moldering  seaport  that  once  rivaled  Boston  in 
her  prosperity  and  that  sent  her  clipper  ships  sailing 
around  the  wide  world.  There  are  many  delightful 
side-trips  out  from  Boston  —  the  sail  across  the  tumbling 
bay  to  Provincetown,  which  still  boasts  a  town  crier, 
down  to  Plymouth  or  up  to  Gloucester,  with  its  smart, 
seaside  resorts  nearby.  And  back  from  Boston  there  are 
other  moldering  towns,  filled  with  fascination  and  ro 
mance.  Some  of  them  have  hardly  changed  within  the 
century. 

Even  Boston  does  not  change  rapidly.  Thank  God 
for  that!\She  keeps  well  to  the  old  customs  and  the 
old  traditions,  holds  tightly  to  her  ideals.  Only  in  the 
folk  who  walk  her  awkward  streets  can  the  discerning 
man  see  the  new  Boston.  The  old  types  of  Brahmins 
are  outclassed.  Some  of  them  still  do  amazingly  well  in 
the  professions  but  these  are  few.  Long  ago  the  steady 
press  of  immigration  at  the  port  of  Boston  took  political 
power  away  from  them.  Yet  the  old  guard  stands  reso- 


14      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

lute.  And  the  impress  of  its  manners  is  not  lost  upon 
the  Boston  of  to-day. 

For  instance,  take  the  vernacular  of  the  town.  Bos 
ton  has  a  rather  old-fashioned  habit  of  speaking  the 
English  language.  It  came  upon  us  rather  suddenly  one 
day  as  we  journeyed  out  Huntington  avenue  to  the 
smart  new  gray  and  red  opera  house.  The  very  color 
ings  of  the  foyer  of  that  house  —  soft  and  simple  —  be 
spoke  the  refinement  of  the  Boston  to-day. 

In  the  Metropolitan  Opera  House,  New  York,  in  every 
other  one  of  the  big  opera  houses  that  are  springing  up 
mushroom- fashion  across  the  land,  our  ears  would  have 
been  assailed  by  "  Librettos !  Get  your  librettos !  "  Not 
so  in  Boston.  At  the  Boston  Opera  House  the  young 
woman  back  of  the  foyer  stand  calmly  announced  at 
clock-like  intervals: 

"  Translations.     Translations." 

And  the  head  usher,  whom  the  older  Bostonians 
grasped  by  the  hand  and  seemed  to  regard  as  a  long- 
lost  friend,  did  not  sip  out,  "  Checks,  please." 

"  Locations,"  he  requested,  as  he  condescended  to  the 
hand-grasps  of  the  socially  elect. 

"  The  nearer  door  for  those  stepping  out,"  announces 
the  guard  upon  the  elevated  train  and  as  for  the  surface 
trolley-cars,  those  wonderful  green  perambulators  laden 
down  with  more  signs  than  nine  ordinary  trolley-cars 
would  carry  at  one  time,  they  do  not  speak  of  the  newest 
type  in  Boston  as  "  Pay-as-you-enter  cars,"  after  the 
fashion  of  less  cultured  communities.  In  the  Hub  they 
are  known  as  Prepayment  cars  —  its  precision  is  unre 
lenting. 

All  of  these  things  make  for  the  furthering  of  the 
charm  of  Boston.  They  are  tangible  assets  and  even 
folk  from  the  newer  parts  of  the  land  are  not  slow  to 
realize  them  as  such  —  remember  that  man  from  the 
Middle  West  who  makes  a  journey  once  or  twice  each 


BOSTON  15 

year  to  be  in  the  very  heart  of  civilization.  There  was 
another  Westerner  —  this  man  a  resident  of  Omaha,  who 
sent  his  boy  —  already  a  graduate  of  a  pretty  well-known 
university  near  Chicago  —  to  do  some  post-graduate  work 
at  Harvard.  A  few  weeks  later  he  had  a  letter  from  his 
son.  It  read  something  after  this  fashion: 

"  It  seems  absurd,  Dad,  but  Harvard  does  have  some 
absurd  regulations.  In  fine,  they  won't  let  me  go  out 
in  a  shell  or  boat  of  any  sort  upon  the  river  without 
special  written  permission  from  you.  Will  you  fix  me 
up  by  return  mail  and  we  will  both  try  to  forget  this 
fool  undergraduate  regulation,  etc.  .  .  ." 

That  regulation  struck  Daddy  about  as  it  had  hit  Sonny. 
But  he  hastened  to  comply  with  the  request.  When  he 
had  finished,  he  felt  that  he  had  turned  out  quite  a 
document,  one  that  would  be  enjoyed  in  the  faculty  and 
perhaps  framed  and  hung  up  in  some  quiet  nook.  It 
read: 

"  To  all  whom  it  may  concern : 

This  is  to  certify  that  my  son,  John  Japson  Jones,  is  hereby 
authorized  and  permitted  to  row,  swim,  dive  or  otherwise  disport 
himself  upon,  above  or  under  the  waters  of  the  Charles  river, 
Massachusetts  bay  and  waters  adjacent  to  them  until  especially 
revoked.  Given  under  my  hand  and  seal  at  the  city  of  Omaha 
in  the  state  of  Nebraska,  on  the  ....th  day  of  October,  19... 
(Signed)  JAMES  JONES." 

Then  James  Jones  awaited  the  consequences.  It  was 
not  long  after  that  the  letter  came  from  John  Japson. 

"—  How  could  you  do  it,  Dad  ?  "  he  demanded.  "  You 
don't  know  these  folks.  They're  not  our  sort.  They 
don't  know  humor.  They're  afraid  of  it.  The  only  man 
I  dared  to  show  that  awful  thing  to  was  the  janitor  and 
he  stuck  up  his  nose.  '  Guess  your  pop  must  have  been 
a  little  full,'  was  his  comment." 

James  Jones  decided  to  come  to  Boston  forthwith.  He 
wanted  to  see  for  himself  what  sort  of  a  community 
John  Japson  had  strayed  into.  He  did  see  Boston,  Cam- 


16      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

bridge  too,  to  his  heart's  content.  Boston  was  his  par 
ticular  delight.  Two  of  its  citizens  took  the  gentleman 
from  Omaha  well  in  hand.  They  showed  him  the  Frog 
Pond  —  it  was  just  before  the  season  when  they  remove 
the  Frog  Pond  for  the  season  and  put  down  the  board 
walks  in  the  Common  —  and  they  showed  him  the  crook- 
edest  streets  of  any  town  upon  the  American  continent. 
They  filled  him  with  beans  and  with  codfish,  tickled  his 
palate  with  the  finest  Medford  rum.  He  mingled  and  he 
browsed  and  before  they  were  done  with  him  his  barbaric 
soul  became  enraptured. 

"Boston  is  great,"  he  admitted,  frankly.  Then,  in  an 
afterthought,  he  added: 

"  I  think  that  I  should  like  to  call  her  the  Omaha  of 
the  East." 

The  owl  still  comes  on  cloudy,  troubled  nights  and 
sits  in  a  high  tree-limb  above  the  quiet  graves  in  the 
graveyard  of  King's  Chapel.  When  he  comes  he  sees 
the  tardiest  of  the  Boston  men,  carrying  the  green  bags, 
that  their  daddies  and  their  granddaddies  before  them 
carried,  as  they  go  slipping  down  the  School  street  hill. 
He  is  a  very  old  owl  and  he  loves  the  old  town  —  loves 
each  of  its  austere  meeting-houses  with  their  belfried 
towers,  loves  the  meeting  places  behind  the  rows  of  chim 
ney-pots,  the  open  reaches  of  the  Common  and  the 
adjoining  Public  Gardens,  where  children  paddle  in  the 
swan-boats  all  summer  long.  He  loves  the  tang  and  mist 
of  the  nearby  sea,  but  best  of  all  he  likes  the  tree-limb 
in  the  old  graveyard,  the  part  of  Boston  that  stands 
changeless  through  the  years  —  that  thrusts  itself  into  the 
very  face  of  modernity  with  the  grimy  stone  church  at 
its  corner  and  seems  to  say : 
"  I  am  the  Past.  To  the  Past,  Reverence." 
And  in  Boston  Modernity  halts  many  times  to  make 
obeisance  to  the  Past. 


2 

AMERICA'S  NEW  YORK 


BEFORE  the  dawn,  metropolitan  New  York  is  astir. 
As  a  matter  of  far  more  accurate  fact  she  never 
sleeps.  You  may  call  her  the  City  of  the  Sleepless  Eye 
and  hit  right  upon  the  mark.  For  at  any  time  of  the 
lonely  hours  of  the  night  she  is  still  a  busy  place.  Ele 
vated  and  subway  trains  and  surface  cars,  although 
shortened  and  reduced  in  number,  are  upon  their  ways 
and  are  remarkably  well  filled.  Regiments  of  men  are 
engaged  in  getting  out  the  morning  papers  —  in  a  dozen 
different  languages  of  the  sons  of  men  —  and  another 
regiment  is  coming  on  duty  to  lay  the  foundations  of 
the  earliest  editions  of  the  evening  papers.  There  are 
workers  here  and  there  and  everywhere  in  the  City  of 
the  Sleepless  Eye. 

But  before  the  dawn,  New  York  becomes  actively 
astir.  Lights  flash  into  dull  radiance  in  the  rows  of 
side-street  tenement  and  apartment  houses  all  the  way 
from  Brooklyn  bridge  to  Bronx  Park.  New  York  is 
beginning  to  dress.  Other  lights  flash  into  short  bril 
liancy  before  the  coming  of  the  dawn.  New  York  is 
beginning  to  eat  its  breakfast.  And  right  afterwards 
the  stations  of  the  elevated  and  the  subway,  the  corners 
where  the  speeding  surface  cars  will  sometimes  hesitate, 
become  the  objects  of  attack  of  an  army  that  is  marching 
upon  the  town.  Workaday  New  York  is  stretching  its 
arms  and  settling  down  to  business. 

Nor  is  the  awakening  city  to  be  confined  to  the  narrow 

17 


i8      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

strip  of  island  between  the  North  and  East  rivers.  Over 
on  Long  island  are  Brooklyn,  Long  Island  City,  Flush 
ing,  Jamaica  and  a  score  of  other  important  places  now 
within  the  limits  of  Greater  New  York.  Some  folk 
find  it  more  economical  to  live  in  these  places  than  in  the 
cramped  confines  of  Manhattan,  and  so  it  is  hardly  dawn 
before  the  great  bridges  and  the  tubes  over  and  under 
the  East  river  are  doing  the  work  for  which  they  were 
built  —  and  doing  it  masterfully. 

The  Brooklyn  bridge  is  the  oldest  of  these  and  yet  it 
has  been  bending  to  its  superhuman  task  for  barely 
thirty  years.  In  these  thirty  years  it  has  been  constantly 
reconstructed  —  but  the  best  devices  of  the  engineers, 
doubling  and  tripling  the  facilities  of  the  original  struc 
ture,  can  hardly  keep  pace  with  the  growth  of  the  com 
munities  and  the  traffic  it  has  to  serve.  So  within  these 
thirty  years  other  bridges  and  two  sets  of  tunnels  have 
come  to  span  the  East  river.  But  the  work  of  the  first 
of  all  man's  highways  to  conquer  the  mighty  water  high 
way  has  hardly  lessened.  The  oldest  of  the  bridges,  and 
the  most  beautiful  despite  the  ugliness  of  its  approaches, 
still  pours  Brooklynites  into  Park  Row,  fifty,  sixty, 
seventy  thousand  to  the  hour. 

The  overloading  of  the  Brooklyn  bridge  is  repeated 
in  the  subway  —  that  hidden  giant  of  New  York,  which 
is  the  real  backbone  of  the  island  of  Manhattan.  Built 
to  carry  four  hundred  thousand  humans  a  day,  that  busy 
railroad  has  begun  to  carry  more  than  a  million  each 
working  day.  How  it  is  done,  no  one,  not  even  the  en 
gineers  of  the  company  that  operates  it,  really  knows. 
The  riders  in  the  great  tube  who  have  to  use  it  during 
the  busiest  of  the  rush  hours  are  willing  to  hazard  a 
guess,  however.  It  is  probable  that  in  no  other  railroad 
of  the  sort  would  jamming  and  crowding  of  this  sort  be 
tolerated  for  more  than  a  week.  Yet  the  patrons  of  the 
subway  not  only  tolerate  but,  after  a  fashion,  they  like 


8. 

TJ 

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CO 


NEW  YORK  19 

it.  You  can  ask  a  New  Yorker  about  it  half  an  hour 
after  his  trip  down  town,  sardine-fashion,  and  he  will 
only  say: 

"The  subway?  It's  the •  greatest  ever.  I  can  come 
down  from  Seventy-second  street  to  Wall  street  in  six 
teen  minutes,  and  in  the  old  days  it  used  to  take  me 
twenty-six  or  twenty-seven  minutes  by  the  elevated." 

There  is  your  real  New  Yorker.  He  would  be  per 
fectly  willing  to  be  bound  and  gagged  and  shot  through 
a  pneumatic  tube  like  a  packet  of  letters,  if  he  thought 
that  he  could  save  twenty  minutes  between  the  Battery 
and  the  Harlem  river.  No  wonder  then  that  he  scorns 
a  relatively  greater  degree  of  comfort  in  elevated  trains 
and  surface  cars  and  hurries  to  the  overcrowded  sub 
way. 

But  New  York  astir  in  the  morning  is  more  even  than 
Manhattan,  the  Bronx  and  the  populous  boroughs  over 
on  Long  island.  Upon  its  westerly  edge  runs  the  Hud 
son  river  —  New  Yorkers  will  always  persist  in  calling 
it  the  North  river  —  one  of  the  masterly  water  high 
ways  of  the  land.  The  busy  East  river  had  been  spanned 
by  man  twice  before  any  man  was  bold  enough  to  sug 
gest  a  continuous  railroad  across  the  Hudson.  Now 
there  are  several  —  the  wonderful  double  tubes  of  the 
Pennsylvania  railroad  leading  from  its  new  terminal  in 
the  uptown  heart  of  Manhattan  —  and  two  double  sets 
of  tunnels  of  a  rapid-transit  railroad  leading  from  New 
Jersey  both  uptown  and  downtown  in  Manhattan.  This 
rapid  transit  railroad  —  the  Hudson  &  Manhattan,  to 
use  its  legal  name,  although  most  New  Yorkers  speak 
of  it  as  the  McAdoo  Tubes,  because  of  the  man  who 
had  the  courage  to  build  it  —  links  workaday  New 
York  with  a  group  of  great  railroad  terminals  that  line 
the  eastern  rim  of  New  Jersey  all  the  way  from  Com- 
munipaw  through  Jersey  City  to  Hoboken.  And  the 
railroads  reach  with  more  than  twenty  busy  arms  off 


20      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

across  the  Jersey  marshes  to  rolling  hills  and  incipient 
mountains.  Upon  those  hills  and  mountains  live  nearly 
a  hundred  thousand  New  Yorkers  —  men  whose  busi 
ness  interests  are  closely  bound  up  in  the  metropolis  of 
the  New  World  but  whose  social  and  home  ties  are  laid 
in  a  neighboring  state.  These  —  together  with  their  fel 
lows  from  Westchester  county,  the  southwestern  corner 
of  Connecticut  and  from  the  Long  island  suburban 
towns  —  measure  a  railroad  journey  of  from  ten  to 
thirty  miles  in  the  morning,  the  same  journey  home  at 
night,  as  but  an  incident  in  their  day's  work.  They  form 
the  great  brigade  of  commuters,  as  a  rule  the  last  of  the 
working  army  of  New  York  to  come  to  business. 

The  commuter  has  his  own  troubles  —  sometimes. 
By  reason  of  his  self-chosen  isolation  he  may  suffer  cer 
tain  deprivations.  The  servant  question  is  not  the  least 
of  these.  And  the  extremes  of  a  winter  in  New  York 
come  hard  upon  him.  There  are  days  when  the  Eight- 
twenty-two  suddenly  loses  all  that  reputation  for  steadi 
ness  and  sobriety  that  it  has  taken  half  a  year  to  achieve, 
days  when  sleepy  schooners  laden  with  brick  and  claim 
ing  the  holy  right-of-way  of  the  navigator  get  caught 
in  the  draw-bridges,  days  when  the  sharp  unexpectedness 
of  a  miniature  blizzard  freezes  terminal  switches  and 
signals  and  tangles  traffic  inexplicably  —  days,  and  nights 
as  well,  when  the  streets  of  his  suburban  village  are 
well-nigh  impassable.  But  these  days  are  in  a  tremen 
dous  minority.  And  even  upon  the  worst  of  them  he 
can  put  the  rush  and  turmoil  of  the  city  behind  him  — 
in  the  peace  and  silence  of  his  country  place  he  can 
forget  the  sorrows  of  Harlem  yesteryear  —  with  the 
noisy  twins  on  the  floor  below  and  the  mechanical  piano 
right  overhead. 

For  nearly  four  hours  the  steady  rush  toward  work 
continues.     You  can  gauge  it  by  a  variety  of  conditions 


NEW  YORK  21 

—  even  by  the  newspapers  that  are  being  spread  wide 
open  the  length  of  the  cars.  In  the  early  morning  the 
popular  penny  papers  —  the  American  and  the  World 
predominating,  with  a  sprinkling  of  the  Press  in  be 
tween.  Two  hours  later  and  while  these  popular  penny 
papers  are  still  being  read  —  they  seem  to  have  a  par 
ticular  vogue  with  the  little  stenographers  and  the  shop 
girls —  the  more  staid  journals  show  themselves.  Men 
who  like  the  solid  reading  of  the  Times,  with  its  law 
calendars  and  its  market  reports;  men  of  the  town  who 
frankly  confess  to  an  affection  for  the  flippancy  of  the 
Sun,  or  who  have  not  lost  the  small-town  spirit  of  their 
youth  enough  to  carry  them  beyond  the  immensely  per 
sonal  tone  of  the  Herald.  And  in  between  these,  men 
who  sniff  at  the  mere  mention  of  the  name  of  Roose 
velt,  and  who  read  the  Tribune  because  their  daddies 
and  their  grand-daddies  in  their  turn  read  it  before 
them,  or  frankly  business  souls  who  are  opening  the 
day  with  a  conscientious  study  of  the  Journal  of  Com 
merce  or  the  Wall  street  sheets. 

New  York  goes  to  work  reading  its  newspaper.  And 
before  you  have  finished  a  Day  of  Days  in  the  biggest 
city  of  the  land  you  might  also  see  that  it  goes  to  lunch 
with  a  newspaper  in  its  hand,  returns  home  tired  with 
the  fearful  thoughts  of  business  to  delve  comfortably 
into  the  gossip  of  the  day  in  the  favorite  evening  paper. 

Just  as  you  stand  at  the  portals  of  the  business  part 
of  the  town  and  measure  the  incoming  throng  by  its 
favorite  papers  so  can  you  sieve  out  the  classes  of  the 
workers  almost  by  the  hours  at  which  they  report  for 
duty.  In  the  early  morning,  in  the  winter  still  by 
artificial  light,  come  those  patient  souls  who  exist  lit 
erally  and  almost  bitterly  by  the  labor  of  their  hands 
and  the  sweat  of  their  brows.  With  them  are  the 
cleaners  and  the  elevator  crews  of  the  great  office-build 
ings —  those  tremendous  commercial  towers  that  New 


22      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

York  has  been  sending  skyward  for  the  past  quarter 
of  a  century.  On  the  heels  of  these  the  first  of  the 
workers  in  the  office-buildings,  office-boys,  young  clerks, 
girl  stenographers  whose  wonderful  attire  is  a  reflec 
tion  of  the  glories  that  we  shall  see  upon  Fifth  avenue 
later  in  this  day.  It  is  pinching  business,  literally  — 
the  dressing  of  these  young  girls.  But  if  their  faces 
are  suspiciously  pinky  or  suspiciously  chalky,  if  their 
pumps  and  thin  silk  stockings,  their  short  skirts  and 
their  open-necked  waists  atrocious  upon  a  chill  and  nasty 
morning,  we  shall  know  that  they  are  but  the  reflection 
of  their  more  comfortable  sisters  uptown.  Not  all  of 
this  rapidly  increasing  army  of  women  workers  in  busi 
ness  New  York  is  artificial.  Not  a  bit  of  it.  There 
are  girls  in  downtown  offices  whose  refinement  of  dress 
and  deportment,  whose  exquisite  poise,  whose  well- 
schooled  voices  might  have  come  from  the  finest  old 
New  York  houses.  And  these  are  the  girls  who  revel 
in  their  Saturday  afternoons  uptown  —  all  in  the  smart 
ness  of  best  bib  and  tucker  —  at  the  matinee  or  fussing 
with  tea  at  Sherry's  or  the  Plaza. 

An  army  of  office  workers  pours  itself  into  the  busi 
ness  buildings  that  line  Broadway  and  its  important 
parallel  streets  all  the  way  from  Forty-second  street  to 
the  Battery  —  that  cluster  with  increasing  discomfort 
in  the  narrow  tip  of  Manhattan  south  of  the  City  Hall. 
Clerks,  stenographers,  more  clerks,  more  stenographers, 
now  department  heads  and  junior  partners  —  finally  the 
big  fellows  themselves,  coming  down  democratically  in 
the  short-haul  trains  of  the  Sixth  avenue  elevated  that 
start  from  Fifty-eighth  street  or  even  enduring  the  dis 
comforts  of  the  subway,  for  it  takes  a  leisurely  sort  of 
a  millionaire  indeed  who  can  afford  to  come  in  his  motor 
car  all  the  way  downtown  through  the  press  and  strain 
of  Broadway  traffic.  After  all  these,  the  Wall  street 
men.  For  the  exchange  opens  at  the  stroke  of  ten  of 


NEW  YORK  23 

Trinity's  clock  and  five  brief  and  bitter  hours  of  trading 
have  begun. 

For  four  hours  this  flood  of  humans  pouring  out  of 
the  ferry-house  and  the  railroad  terminals,  up  from  the 
subway  kiosks  and  out  from  the  narrow  stairways  of 
the  elevated  railroads.  The  narrow  downtown  streets 
congest,  again  and  again.  The  sidewalks  overflow  and 
traffic  takes  to  the  middle  of  the  streets.  But  the  great 
office  buildings  absorb  the  major  portion  of  the  crowds. 
Their  vertical  railroads  —  eight  or  ten  or  twenty  or 
thirty  cars  —  are  working  to  capacity  and  workaday  New 
York  is  sifting  itself  to  its  task.  By  ten  o'clock  the 
office  buildings  are  aglow  with  industry  —  the  great  ma 
chine  of  business  starting  below  the  level  of  the  street 
and  reaching  high  within  the  great  commercial  towers. 

II 
,  New  York  is  the  City  of  the  Towers. 

Sometimes  a  well-traveled  soul  will  arise  in  the 
majesty  of  contemplation  and  say  that  in  the  American 
metropolis  he  sees  the  shadowy  ghost  of  some  foreign 
one.  Along  Madison  square,  where  the  cabbies  still 
stand  in  a  long,  gently-curving,  expectant  line  he  will 
draw  his  breath  through  his  teeth,  point  with  his  walk 
ing  stick  through  the  tracery  of  spring-blossoming 
foliage  at  Diana  on  her  tower-perch  and  whisper 
reverently:  \ 

"  It  is  Paris  —  Paris  once  again." 

And  there  is  a  lower  corner  of  Central  Park  that 
makes  him  think  of  Berlin ;  a  long  row  of  red  brick 
houses  with  white  trimmings  along  the  north  shore  of 
Washington  square  that  is  a  resemblance  to  blocks  of 
a  similar  sort  in  London. 

But  he  is  quite  mistaken.  New  York  does  not  aim 
to  be  a  replica  of  any  foreign  metropolis.  She  has  her 
own  personality,  her  own  aggressive  individualism;  she  | 


24      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

is  the  City  of  the  Towers  as  well  as  the  City  of  the  Sleep 
less  Eye  —  and  no  mean  city  at  that.  Take  some  clever 
European  traveler,  a  man  who  can  find  his  way  around 
any  of  the  foreign  capitals  with  his  eyes  shut,  and  let 
him  come  to  New  York  for  the  first  time ;  approach  our 
own  imperial  city  through  her  most  impressive  gateway 
—  that  narrow  passage  from  the  sea  between  the  ram 
parts  of  the  guarding  fortresses.  This  man,  this  trav 
eler,  has  heard  of  the  towers  of  the  great  New  World 
city  —  they  have  been  baldly  pictured  to  him  as  giant, 
top-heavy  barracks,  meaningless  compositions  of  ugly 
blank  walls,  punctuated  with  an  infinity  of  tiny  windows. 
That  is  the  typical  libel  that  has  gone  forth  about  New 
York. 

He  sees  naught  of  such.  He  sees  a  great  city,  the 
height  of  its  buildings  simply  conveying  the  impression 
from  afar  that  it  is  builded  upon  a  steep  ridge.  Here 
and  there  a  building  of  still  loftier  height  gives  accent 
to  the  whole,  emphasis  to  what  might  otherwise  be  a 
colorless  mass;  gives  that  mysterious  tone  and  contrast 
which  the  artist  is  pleased  to  call  "  composition."  Four 
of  these  towers  already  rise  distinct  from  the  giant  sky 
scrapers  of  Manhattan.  Each  for  this  moment  pro 
claims  a  victory  of  the  American  architect  and  the  Amer 
ican  builder  over  the  most  difficult  problem  ever  placed 
before  architect  or  builder. 

The  European  traveler  will  give  praise  to  the  sky 
line  of  New  York  as  he  sees  it  from  the  steamer's  deck. 

"  It  is  the  City  of  the  Towers,"  he  will  say. 

In  this,  your  Day  of  Days  in  New  York,  come  with 
us  and  see  the  making  of  a  skyscraper.  This  skyscraper 
is  the  new  Municipal  Building.  It  is  just  behind  the 
tree-filled  park  in  which  stands  New  York's  oldest  bit 
of  successful  architecture  —  its  venerable  City  Hall.  A 
long  time  before  New  York  dreamed  that  she  might 


NEW  YORK  25 

become  the  City  of  the  Towers  they  builded  this  old 
City  Hall  —  upon  what  was  then  the  northerly  edge  of 
the  town.  So  sure  were  those  old  fellows  that  New 
York  would  never  grow  north  of  their  fine  town  hall  that 
they  grew  suddenly  economical  —  the  spirit  of  their 
Dutch  forbears  still  dominated  them  —  and  builded  the 
north  wall  of  Virginia  freestone  instead  of  the  white 
marble  that  was  used  for  the  facings  of  the  other  walls. 

"  No  one  will  ever  see  that  side  of  the  building,"  they 
argued.  "  We  might  as  well  use  cheap  stone  for  that 
wall." 

Today  more  than  ninety-nine  per  cent,  of  the  popula 
tion  of  the  immensely  populated  island  of  Manhattan 
lives  north  of  the  City  Hall.  That  cheap  north  wall, 
hidden  under  countless  coats  of  white  paint,  is  the 
one  acute  reminder  of  the  days  that  were  when  the 
Hall  was  new  —  when  the  gentle  square  in  which  it 
stood  was  surrounded  by  the  suburban  residences  of 
prosperous  New  Yorkers  and  when  the  waters  of  the 
Collect  Pond  —  where  the  New  York  boys  use  to  skate 
in  the  bitterness  of  old-fashioned  winters  —  lapped  its 
northerly  edge.  There  was  no  ugly  Court  House  or  even 
uglier  Post  Office  to  block  the  view  from  the  Mayor's 
office  up  and  down  Broadway.  New  Yorkers  were 
proud  of  their  City  Hall  then  —  and  good  cause  had  they 
for  their  pride.  It  is  one  of  the  best  bits  of  architec 
ture  in  all  America.  And  an  even  century  of  hard 
usage  and  countless  "  restorations  "  has  only  brought  to 
it  the  charm  of  serene  old  age. 

But  the  City  Hall  long  since  was  outgrown.  The  mu 
nicipal  government  of  New  York  is  a  vast  and  somewhat 
unwieldy  machine  that  can  hardly  be  housed  within  a 
dozen  giant  structures.  To  provide  offices  for  the 
greater  part  of  the  city's  official  machinery,  this  tower 
ing  Municipal  Building  has  just  been  erected.  And 
because  it  is  so  typical  of  the  best  form  of  the  so-called 


26      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

skyscraper  architecture,  let  us  stop  and  take  a  look  at 
it,  listen  to  the  story  of  its  construction.  In  appearance 
the  new  Municipal  Building  is  a  gray-stone  tower 
twenty-five  stories  in  height  and  surmounted  by  a  tower 
cupola  an  additional  fifteen  stories  in  height.  In  plan 
the  structure  is  a  sort  of  semi-octagon  —  a  very  shallow 
letter  "  U,"  if  you  please.  But  its  most  unusual  feature 
comes  from  the  fact  that  it  squarely  spans  one  of  the 
busiest  crosstown  highways  in  the  lower  part  of  the 
city  —  Chambers  street.  The  absorption  of  that  busy 
thoroughfare  is  recognized  by  a  great  depressed  bay 
upon  the  west  front  —  the  main  facade  of  the  building. 
And  incidentally  that  depressed  bay  makes  interior 
courts  within  the  structure  absolutely  unnecessary.  So 
much  for  the  architectural  features,  severe  in  its  detail, 
save  for  some  ornate  and  not  entirely  pleasing  sculp 
tures.  You  are  interested  in  knowing  how  one  of  these 
giants  —  so  typical  of  the  new  New  York  —  are  fab 
ricated. 

This  young  man  —  hardly  a  dozen  years  out  of  a  big 

technical  school  —  can  tell  you.     He  has  supervised  the 

job.     Sometimes  he  has  slept  on  it  —  in  a  narrow  cot 

in    the    temporary     draughting-house.     He    knows    its 

"every  detail,  as  he  knows  the  fingers  of  his  hands. 

"  Just  remember  that  we  began  by  planning  a  railroad 
station  in  the  basement  with  eight  platform  tracks  for 
loading  and  unloading  passengers." 

"  A  railroad  station  ?  "  you  interrupt. 

"  Certainly,"  is  his  decisive  reply.  "  Downstairs  we 
will  soon  have  the  most  important  terminal  of  a  brand 
new  subway  system  crossing  the  Manhattan  and  the 
Williamsburgh  bridges  and  reaching  over  Brooklyn  like 
a  giant  gridiron." 

He  goes  on  to  the  next  matter  —  this  one  settled. 

"  There  was  something  more  than  that.  We  had  to 
plant  on  that  cellar  a  building  towering  forty  stories 


NEW  YORK  27 

in  the  air;  its  steel  frame  alone  weighing  twenty-six 
thousand  tons  —  more  than  half  the  weight  of  the  heav 
iest  steel  cantilever  bridge  in  America  —  had  to  be 
firmly  set." 

The  young  engineer  explains  —  in  some  detail.  To 
find  a  foothold  for  this  building  was  no  sinecure.  Tests 
with  the  diamond  drill  had  shown  that  solid  rock  rested 
at  a  depth  of  145  feet  below  street  level  at  the  south  end 
of  the  plat.  At  the  north  end,  the  rock  sloped  away  rap 
idly  and  so  that  part  of  the  building  rests  upon  com 
pact  sand.  The  rock  topography  of  Manhattan  island 
is  uncertain.  There  are  broad  areas  where  solid  gneiss 
crops  close  to  the  street  level,  others  where  it  falls  a  hun 
dred  feet  or  more  below  water  level.  There  is  a  hidden 
valley  at  Broadway  and  Reade  street,  a  deep  bowl  far 
ther  up  Broadway.  Similarly,  the  north  extremity  of 
the  Municipal  Building  rests  upon  the  edge  of  still  an 
other  granite  bowl  —  the  sub-surface  of  that  same  Col 
lect  Pond  upon  which  the  New  York  boys  used  to  skate 
a  century  or  more  ago. 

"  That  bothered  some  folks  at  first,"  laughs  the  engi 
neer,  "  but  we  met  it  by  sinking  the  caissons.  We've 
more  than  a  hundred  piers  down  under  this  structure 
hanging  on  to  Mother  Earth.  You  don't  realize  the  hold 
ing  force  of  those  piers,"  he  continues.  He  turns  quickly 
and  points  to  a  fourteen  story  building  off  over  the  trees 
of  City  Hall  park.  Out  in  one  of  the  good-sized  towns 
of  the  Middle  West  people  would  gasp  a  little  at  sight 
of  it  —  in  New  York  it  is  no  longer  even  a  tower. 

"  Turn  that  fellow  right  upside  down  into  the  hole 
we  dug  for  this  building,"  says  the  engineer,  "  and  the 
rim  of  his  uppermost  cornice  would  about  reach  the 
feet  of  our  own  little  forest  of  buried  concrete  piers." 

That  was  one  detail  of  the  construction  of  the  build 
ing.  Here  is  another;  the  first  six  stories  of  the  new 
structure  involved  elaborate  masonry,  giant  stones,  much 


28      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

carved.  From  the  seventh  story  the  plain  walls  of  the 
exterior  developing  into  an  elaborate  cornice  were  of 
simple  construction.  If  the  setting  of  these  upper  floors 
had  waited  until  the  first  six  stories  of  elaborate  stone 
work  had  been  made  ready  there  would  have  been  a 
delay  of  months  in  the  construction  work.  So  the  con 
tractor  began  building  the  walls  —  which  in  the  modern 
steel  skyscraper  as  you  know  form  no  part  of  the  real 
structure  but  act  rather  as  a  stone  envelope  to  keep 
out  hard  weather  —  from  the  seventh  story  upward. 
Eventually  the  masons  working  on  the  first  six  stories, 
working  upwards  all  the  time,  reached  and  joined  the 
lower  edge  of  the  masonry  that  had  been  set  some  weeks 
before.  Time  had  been  saved  and  you  know  that  time 
does  count  in  New  York.  Remember  the  Wall  street 
man  who  preferred  to  have  his  ribs  crushed  and  his  hat 
smashed  down  over  his  nose  in  the  subway  rather  than 
lose  ten  minutes  each  day  in  the  elevated. 

Now  you  stand  with  the  young  engineer  at  the  top 
most  outlook  of  the  tower  in  the  Municipal  Building  and 
look  down  on  the  busy  town.  Before  you  is  that  mighty 
thoroughfare,  Broadway  —  but  so  lined  with  towering 
buildings  that  you  cannot  see  it,  save  for  a  brief  space 
as  it  passes  the  greenery  of  the  City  Hall  Park; 
behind  you  is  that  still  mightier  highway  —  the  East 
river.  Over  that  river  you  see  the  four  bridges  —  the 
oldest  of  them  landing  at  your  very  feet  —  and 
crawling  things  upon  them,  which  a  second  glance  shows 
to  be  trains  and  trolley-cars  and  automobiles  and  wagons 
in  an  unending  succession.  Beyond  the  East  river  and 
its  bridges  —  the  last  of  these  far  to  the  north  and 
barely  discernible  —  is  Brooklyn,  and  beyond  Brooklyn 
—  this  time  to  the  south  —  is  a  shimmering  slender 
horizon  of  silver  that  the  man  beside  you  tells  you  is 
the  ocean. 

You  let  your  gaze  come  back  to  the  wonderful  view 


NEW  YORK  29 

which  the  building  squarely  faces.  You  look  down  upon 
the  towers  of  New  York  —  big  towers  and  little  towers  — 
and  you  lift  your  eyes  over  the  dingy  mansard  of  the 
old  Post  Office  and  see  the  greatest  of  all  the  towers  — 
the  creamy  white  structure  that  a  man  has  builded  from 
his  profits  in  the  business  of  selling  small  articles  at  five 
and  ten  cents  apiece.  It  is  fifty-five  stories  in  height 
—  exquisitely  beautiful  in  detail  —  and  the  owner  will 
possess  for  a  little  time  at  least,  the  highest  building  in 
the  world.  You  can  see  the  towers  in  every  vista,  puf 
fing  little  clouds  of  white  smoke  into  the  purest  blue  air 
that  God  ever  gave  a  city  in  which  to  spin  her  fabrica 
tions.  To  the  north,  the  south,  the  west,  they  show 
themselves  in  every  infinite  variety  and  here  and  there 
between  them  emerge  up-shouldering  rivals,  steel-naked 
in  their  gaunt  frames.  If  your  ears  are  keen  and  the 
wind  be  favorable  perhaps  you  can  hear  the  clatter  of 
the  riveters  and  you  can  see  over  there  the  housesmiths 
riding  aloft  on  the  swinging  girders  with  an  utter  and 
immensely  professional  indifference,  threading  the  slen 
der,  dizzy  floor-girders  as  easily  as  a  cat  might  tread 
the  narrow  edge  of  a  backyard  fence. 

Off  with  your  gaze  again.  Look  uptown,  catch  the 
faint  patch  of  dark  green  that  is  Central  Park,  the  spires 
of  the  cathedral,  the  wonderful  campanile  at  Madison 
square.  Let  your  glance  swing  across  the  gentle  Hud 
son,  over  into  a  New  Jersey  that  is  bounded  by  the 
ridges  of  the  Orange  mountains,  then  slowly  south  and 
even  the  great  towers  that  thrust  themselves  into  almost 
every  buildable  foot  of  Broadway  below  the  City  Hall 
cannot  entirely  block  your  view  of  the  wonderful  upper 
harbor  of  New  York  —  of  the  great  ships  that  bring  to 
an  imperial  city  the  tribute  that  is  rightfully  hers. 

Now  let  your  vision  drop  into  the  near  foreground  — 
into  the  tracery  of  trees  about  the  jewel-box  of  a  City 
Hall.  Let  it  pause  for  a  moment  in  the  broad-paved 


30      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

street  at  your  feet  with  the  queer  little  openings  through 
which  humans  are  sweeping  like  a  black  stream  into  a 
funnel;  others  from  which  the  human  streams  come 
crawling  upward  like  black  molasses  and  you  are  again 
reminded  that  some  of  the  greatest  highways  of  New 
York  are  those  that  are  subterranean  and  unseen.  The 
sidewalks  grow  a  little  blacker  than  before. 

"  It's  lunch-time,"  laughs  the  young  engineer. 

Bless  you,  it  is.  The  morning  that  you  gave  to  one 
of  the  most  typical  of  the  towers  has  not  been  ill-spent. 

in 

Thirty  minutes  before  the  big  bell  of  Trinity  spire 
booms  out  noon-tide  New  York's  busiest  grub-time  be 
gins.  A  few  early-breakfasting  clerks  and  office-boys 
begin  to  find  their  way  toward  the  shrines  of  the  coffee- 
urns  and  the  heaped-up  piles  of  sandwiches. 

Of  course,  in  New  York  breakfast  is  an  almost  end 
less  affair  —  generally  a  fearfully  hurried  one.  But 
lunch  is  far  more  serious.  Lunch  is  almost  an  institu 
tion.  Fifteen  minutes  after  it  is  fairly  begun  it  is  gain 
ing  rapid  headway.  Thin  trails  of  stenographers  and 
clerks  are  finding  their  ways,  lunch-bound,  through  the 
canyon-like  streets  of  lower  Manhattan,  streams  that 
momentarily  increase  in  volume.  By  the  time  that 
Trinity  finally  booms  its  twelve  stout  strokes  down  into 
Broadway  there  is  congestion  upon  the  sidewalks  —  the 
favorite  stools  at  the  counters,  the  better  tables  in  the 
higher-priced  places  are  being  rapidly  filled.  At  twelve- 
thirty  it  begins  to  be  luck  to  get  any  sort  of  accommoda 
tions  at  the  really  popular  places ;  before  one  o'clock  the 
intensity  of  grubbing  verges  on  panic  and  pandemonium. 
And  at  a  little  before  three  cashiers  are  totaling  their 
receipts,  cooks,  donning  their  hats  and  coats  to  go  uptown, 
and  waiters  and  'buses  are  upturning  chairs  and  scrub 
bing  floors  with  scant  regard  for  belated  lunchers  who 


NEW  YORK  31 

have  to  be  content  with  the  crumbs  that  are  left  after 
the  ravishing  and  hungry  army  has  been  fed.  Order 
after  pandemonium  —  readiness  for  the  two  hours  of 
gorge  upon  the  morrow.  The  restaurants  and  lunch 
rooms  are  as  quiet  as  Trinity  church-yard  and  some 
thing  like  three  quarters  of  a  million  hungry  souls  have 
lunched  in  the  business  section  of  Manhattan  south  of 
Twenty-third  street  —  at  a  total  cost,  according  to  the 
estimate  of  a  shrewd  restauranteur  of  a  quarter  of  a 
million  dollars. 

You  may  pay  your  money  and  take  your  choice.  The 
shrewd  little  newsboys  and  office-boys  who  find  their 
way  to  the  short  block  of  Ann  street  between  Park  Row 
and  Nassau  —  the  real  Grub  street  of  New  York  —  are 
proving  themselves  financiers  of  tomorrow  by  dickering 
for  sandwiches  — "  two  cents  apiece ;  three  for  a  nickel." 
They  always  buy  them  in  lots  of  three.  That  is  busi 
ness  and  business  is  not  to  be  scorned  for  a  single  in 
stant.  Or  you  can  pay  as  high  prices  in  the  swagger 
restaurants  downtown  as  you  do  in  the  swagger  res 
taurants  uptown  —  and  that  is  saying  much.  When 
lunch-time  comes  you  can  suit  the  inclinations  of  your 
taste  —  and  your  pocket-book.  But  the  average  New 
Yorker  seems  to  run  quite  strongly  to  the  peculiar  form 
of  lunch-room  in  which  you  help  yourself  to  what  you 
want,  compute  from  the  markers  the  cost  of  your  mid 
day  meal,  announce  that  total  to  the  cashier,  who  is 
perfectly  content  to  take  your  word  for  it,  pay  the 
amount  and  walk  out.  It  seems  absurd  —  to  any  one 
who  does  not  understand  New  Yorkers.  The  lunch 
room  owners  do  understand  them.  New  York  business 
men  and  business  boys  are  honest,  as  a  general  thing  — 
particularly  honest  in  little  matters  of  this  sort. 

"  It  is  all  very  simple,"  says  the  manager  of  one  of 
these  big  lunch-rooms,  who  stands  beside  you  for  a 


32      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

moment  at  the  entrance  of  one  of  his  places  —  it  boasts 
that  it  serves  more  than  two  thousand  lunches  each  busi 
ness  day  between  eleven  and  three.  "  I've  been  through 
the  whole  mill.  I've  been  check  boy  and  oyster 
man,  cashier  —  now  I'm  looking  out  for  this  particular 
beanery.  Honor  among  New  York  business  men? 
There's  a  lot  of  it." 

"  And  you  don't  run  many  risks  ?  "  you  venture. 

"  Not  many  here,"  he  promptly  replies.  "  But  there 
was  a  man  in  here  yesterday,  who  runs  a  cafeteria  out 
in  Chicago.  I  was  telling  him  some  of  the  rules  of  the 
game  here  —  how  when  a  customer  comes  in  and  throws 
his  hat  down  in  a  chair  before  he  goes  over  to  the  sand 
wich  and  coffee  counters  that  chair  is  his,  until  he  gets 
good  and  ready  to  go.  My  Chicago  friend  laughed  at 
that.  '  If  we  were  to  do  that  out  in  my  neck-o'-the- 
woods,'  says  he,  '  the  customer  would  lose  his  hat/  And 
the  uptown  department  stores  don't  take  any  chances, 
either.  At  one  of  the  biggest  of  them  they  make  the 
women  decide  what  they  will  eat,  but  before  they  can 
start  they  must  buy  a  check  —  pay  in  advance,  you 
understand.  They've  tried  the  downtown  way  —  and 
now  they  take  no  chances." 

The  floor  manager  laughs  nervously. 

"  It's  different  with  the  girls  downtown.  We've 
started  one  quick  buffet  lunch  on  the  honor  plan,  same 
dishes  and  prices  and  service  as  the  men's  places,  but 
this  one  is  for  business  girls.  They  said  at  first  that 
we  wouldn't  make  good  with  them  —  but  we're  ready 
to  start  another  within  the  month.  The  business  girls 
don't  cheat  —  no  matter  what  their  uptown  sisters  may 
try  to  do." 

As  a  matter  of  fact  downtown  business  girls  in  New 
York  eat  very  sensibly.  Sweets  are  popular  but  not 
invariable.  They  prefer  candy,  with  fruit  as  a  second 


NEW  YORK  33 

choice,  to  be  eaten  some  time  during  the  afternoon.  In 
big  offices,  where  many  girls  are  employed,  "  candy 
pools  "  are  often  made,  each  girl  contributing  five  cents 
and  getting  her  pro  rata,  one  member  of  the  staff  being 
delegated  to  make  the  purchases.  Eaten  in  this  way 
the  candy  acts  as  a  stimulant  during  the  late  afternoon 
hours,  in  much  the  same  way  as  the  invariable  tea  of 
the  business  man  in  London. 

The  business  girl  in  New  York  takes  her  full  hour  for 
luncheon.  It  is  seldom  a  minute  more  or  a  minute  less. 
She  is  willing  as  a  rule  to  stay  overtime  at  night  but  she 
feels  that  she  must  have  her  sixty  minutes  in  the  middle 
of  the  day.  A  part  of  the  lunch  hour  is  always  a  stroll 
—  unless  there  be  a  downpour.  Certain  downtown 
streets  from  twelve  to  one  o'clock  each  day  suggest  the 
proximity  of  a  nearby  high  school  or  seminary.  There 
is  much  pairing  off  and  quiet  flirtation.  This  noon-day 
promenade  of  girls  —  for  the  most  part  astonishingly 
well-dressed  girls  and  invariably  in  twos  and  threes  —  is 
one  of  the  sights  of  downtown  New  York.  Some  of  the 
girls  gather  in  the  old  churchyards  of  Trinity  and  St. 
Paul's  —  in  lower  Broadway  —  on  pleasant  days.  They 
sit  down  among  the  tombstones  with  their  little  packages 
of  food  and  eat  and  chat  and  then  stroll.  No  one  molests 
them  and  the  church  authorities,  although  a  little  flustered 
when  this  first  began,  have  seen  that  there  is  no  harm  in  it 
and  let  the  girls  have  their  own  way.  There  is  always 
great  decorousness  and  these  big  open-air  spaces  in  the 
midst  of  the  crowded  street  canyons  are  enjoyed  by  the 
women  who  appreciate  the  grass  and  winding  paths 
after  the  hard  pavements. 

All  the  business  girls  downtown  are  not  content  with 
sitting  after  lunch  among  the  tombstones  of  St.  Paul's 
churchyard  or  of  Trinity.  He  was  indeed  a  canny 
lunch-man  who  took  note  of  all  the  girls  strolling  in  the 
narrow  streets  of  downtown  Manhattan,  who  remem- 


34      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

bered  that  all  New  York,  rich  or  poor,  loves  to  dance 
and  who  then  fitted  up  an  unrentable  third  floor  loft 
over  his  eating  place  as  a  dancing  hall.  Two  violins  and 
a  piano  —  a  gray-bearded  sandwich  man  to  patrol  the 
streets  with  "  DANCING  "  placarded  fore  and  aft  upon 
his  boards  —  the  trick  was  done.  Mamie  told  Sadie  and 
Sadie  told  Elinor  and  Elinor  told  Flossie  and  the  lunch- 
man  began  to  grow  famous.  He  made  further  study  of 
the  psychology  of  his  patrons.  There  were  the  young 
fellows  —  shipping  and  file  clerks  and  even  ambitious 
young  office-boys  to  be  considered.  There  were  the 
after-lunch  smokes  of  these  young  captains  of  industry 
to  come  into  the  reckoning.  The  lunch-man  placed  a 
row  of  chairs  along  one  edge  of  his  dancing-hall  and 
over  them  "  Smoking  Permitted  at  This  End  of  the 
Room."  After  that  Mamie  and  Sadie  and  Elinor  and 
Flossie  had  partners  and  the  lunch-man  was. on  the  high 
way  to  a  six-cylinder  motor  car.  He  has  his  imitators. 
If  you  were  in  business  in  lower  New  York  and  your 
stenographer  began  to  hum  the  "  Blue  Danube  "  along 
about  half  an  hour  before  noon  you  would  very  well 
know  she  was  gathering  steam  for  the  blissful  twenty 
minutes  of  dancing  that  was  going  to  help  her  digest 
her  lunch. 

You,  yourself,  are  going  to  lunch  in  still  another  sort 
of  restaurant.  It  is  characteristic  of  a  type  that  has 
sprung  up  on  the  tip  of  Manhattan  island  within  the 
past  dozen  years.  You  reach  this  grubbing-place  by 
skirting  the  front  doors  of  unspeakably  dirty  eating- 
houses  in  a  mean  street  of  the  Syrian  quarter.  Finally 
you  turn  the  corner  of  a  dingy  brick  building,  which  was 
once  the  great  house  of  one  of  the  contemporaries  of  the 
first  of  the  Vanderbilts  and  which  has  managed  to  escape 
destruction  for  three  quarters  of  a  century  and  face — • 


NEW  YORK  35 

the  only  skyscraper  in  congested  New  York  which 
stands  in  a  grass-platted  yard  —  the  whim  of  its  wealthy 
owner.  A  fast  elevator  whisks  you  thirty  stories  to  the 
top  of  the  building  and  you  step  into  the  lobby  of  what 
looks,  at  first  glance,  to  be  the  entrance  hall  of  some 
fine  restaurant  in  uptown's  Fifth  avenue.  But  this 
is  a  lunching-club  —  one  of  the  newest  in  the  town  as 
well  as  one  of  the  most  elaborate. 

Elaborate  did  we  say?  This  is  the  elaboration  of  per 
fect  taste  —  unobtrusive  rugs,  hangings,  lighting  fix 
tures  and  furniture  —  great,  broad  rooms  and  from  their 
windows  there  comes  to  you  another  of  the  spectacular 
views  that  lay  below  the  man-made  peaks  of  Manhat 
tan.  To  the  south  —  the  smooth,  blue  surface  of  the 
upper  bay  —  in  the  foreground  a  nine  hundred  foot  ship 
coming  to  the  new  land,  her  funnels  lazily  breathing 
smoke  at  the  first  lull  in  her  four-day  race  across  the 
Atlantic;  to  the  east,  a  mighty  river  and  its  bridges, 
Brooklyn  again  and  on  very  clear  days,  visions  of  Long 
island;  to  the  north  the  most  wonderful  building  con 
struction  that  man  has  ever  attempted,  Babylonic  in 
its  immensity;  to  the  west  the  brisk  waterway  of  the 
North  river  and  beyond  it,  Jersey  City,  sandwiched  in 
between  the  smoky  spread  of  railroad  yards.  This  is 
the  sort  of  thing  that  Mr.  Downtown  Luncher  may  have 
—  if  he  is  willing  to  pay  the  price.  On  torrid  summer 
days  he  may  ascend  to  the  roof-garden,  may  glance 
lazily  below  him  at  the  activities  of  the  busiest  city  in 
the  world  and  sip  up  the  cool  breezes  from  the  sea,  while 
folk  down  in  the  bottom  of  the  Broadway  chasm  are 
sweltering  from  heat  and  humidity.  And  in  winter  he 
will  find  a  complete  gymnasium  in  operation  on  another 
floor  of  the  club,  with  a  competent  instructor  in  charge. 
The  "  doctor,"  as  they  call  him,  will  lay  out  a  course 
of  work.  And  that  course  of  work,  calling  for  a  half- 


36      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

hour  of  exercise  each  day  just  before  lunch  will  make 
dyspeptic  and  paunchy  old  money-grubbers  alike,  keen 
as  farmhands  coming  into  dinner. 

And  yet  this  club,  typical  of  so  many  others  in  the 
downtown  business  heart  of  Manhattan,  is  but  a  cog 
in  the  mighty  machine  of  the  lunching  of  the  workaday 
multitudes  of  downtown.  Its  doors  are  closed  and  lights 
are  out  at  six  o'clock  in  the  evening,  save  on  extraordi 
nary  occasions ;  while  most  of  its  hundred  or  more  well- 
trained  waiters  go  uptown  to  assist  in  the  dinner  and 
the  late  supper  rushes  of  the  fashionable  restaurants  in 
the  theater  and  hotel  district.  Like  most  of  its  com 
peers,  it  is  an  outgrowth  of  the  wonderfully  comfortable 
old  Lawyers'  Club,  which  was  completely  destroyed  in 
the  great  fire  that  burned  the  Equitable  Building  in  Jan 
uary,  1912.  From  that  organization,  famed  for  its  noon 
day  hospitality  and  for  the  quality  of  the  folk  you  might 
meet  between  its  walls,  have  sprung  many  other  down 
town  lunch  clubs  —  the  Whitehall,  the  Hardware,  the 
Manufacturers,  the  Downtown  Association,  the  new 
Lawyers  —  many,  many  others ;  almost  invariably  oc 
cupying  the  upper  floors  of  some  skyscraper  that  has 
been  planned  especially  for  them.  These  clubs  are  not 
cheap.  It  costs  from  sixty  to  a  hundred  dollars  to  enter 
one  of  them  and  about  as  much  more  yearly  in  the  form 
of  dues.  Their  restaurant  charges  are  far  from  low- 
priced.  They  are  never  very  exclusive  organizations 
and  yet  they  give  to  the  strain  of  the  workaday  New 
Yorker  his  last  lingering  trace  of  hospitality  —  the  hos 
pitality  that  has  lingered  around  Bowling  Green  and 
Trinity  and  St.  Paul's  church-yards  since  colonial  days 
and  the  coffee  houses. 

Even  the  hospitality  of  the  genial  host  seems  to  end 
—  with  the  ending  of  the  lunch-hour.  As  he  takes  his 
last  sip  of  cafe  noir  he  is  tugging  at  his  watch. 


NEW  YORK  37 

"  Bless  me,"  he  says,  "  It  is  going  on  three  o'clock. 
I've  got  that  railroad  crowd  due  in  my  office  in  fifteen 
minutes." 

That  is  your  dismissal.  For  ninety  minutes  he  has 
given  you  his  hospitality  —  his  rare  and  unselfish  self. 
He  has  put  the  perplexing  details  of  his  business  out  of 
his  mind  and  given  himself  to  whatever  flow  of  talk 
might  suit  your  fancy.  Now  the  hour  and  a  half  of 
grace  is  over  —  and  you  are  dismissed,  courteously  — 
but  none  the  less  dismissed.  With  your  host  you  descend 
to  the  crowded  noisome  street.  He  sees  you  to  the 
subway  —  gives  you  a  fine  warm  grasp  of  his  strong 
hand  —  and  plunges  back  into  the  great  and  grinding 
machine  of  business. 

Lunch  in  your  Day  of  Days  within  the  City  of  the  Tow 
ers  is  over.  Three  o'clock.  Before  the  last  echoes  of 
Trinity's  bell  go  ringing  down  through  Wall  street  to 
halt  the  busy  Exchange  —  the  multitude  has  been  fed. 
Miss  Stenographer  has  had  her  salad  and  eclair,  two 
waltzes  and  perhaps  a  "  turkey  trot "  into  the  bar 
gain,  and  is  back  at  the  keys  of  her  typewriter.  Mr. 
President  has  entertained  that  Certain  Party  at  the 
club  and  has  made  him  promise  to  sign  that  mighty  im 
portant  contract.  And  the  certain  Party  and  Mr.  Presi 
dent  rode  for  half  an  hour  on  the  mechanical  horses  in 
the  gymnasium.  What  fun,  too,  for  those  old  boys? 

Three  o'clock!  The  cashiers  are  totaling  their  re 
ceipts,  the  waiters  and  the  'buses  are  upturning  chairs 
and  tables  to  make  way  for  the  scrub-women,  some  are 
already  beginning  to  don  their  overcoats  to  go  uptown; 
but  the  three-quarters  of  a  million  of  hungry  mouths 
have  been  fed.  New  York  has  caught  its  breath  in 
mid-day  relaxation  and  once  more  is  hard  at  work  — 
putting  in  the  last  of  its  hours  of  the  business  day  with 
renewed  and  feverish  energy. 


38      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

IV 

You  had  planned  at  first  to  walk  up  Broadway. 
You  wanted  to  see  once  again  the  church-yards  around 
Trinity  and  St.  Paul's,  perhaps  make  a  side  excur 
sion  down  toward  Fraunces'  Tavern  —  just  now  come 
back  into  its  own  again.  Some  of  the  old  landmarks 
that  are  still  hidden  around  downtown  New  York  seemed 
to  appeal  to  you.  But  your  host  at  luncheon  laughed 
at  you. 

"  If  you  want  to  spend  your  time  that  way,  all  right/' 
he  said,  "  but  the  only  really  old  things  you  will  find 
in  New  York  are  the  faces  of  the  young  men.  You  can 
find  those  anywhere  in  the  town." 

And  there  was  another  reckoning  to  be  figured. 
Three  o'clock  means  the  day  well  advanced  and  there  is 
a  vis-a-vis  awaiting  you  uptown.  Of  course,  there  is 
a  Her  to  enjoy  your  Day  of  Days  with  you.  And  just 
for  convenience  alone  we  will  call  her  Katherine.  It 
is  a  pretty  name  for  a  woman,  and  it  will  do  here  and 
now  quite  as  well  as  any  other. 

Katherine  is  waiting  for  you  in  the  Fourteenth  street 
station  of  the  subway.  She  is  prompt  —  after  the 
fashion  of  most  New  York  girls.  And  it  is  a  relief  to 
come  out  of  the  overcrowded  tube  and  find  her  there  at 
the  entrance  that  leads  up  to  sunshine  and  fresh  air. 
She  knows  her  New  York  thoroughly  and  as  a  prelude 
to  the  trip  uptown  she  leads  you  over  to  Fifth  avenue  — 
to  the  upper  deck  of  one  of  those  big  green  peregrinating 
omnibuses. 

"  It's  a  shame  that  we  could  not  have  started  at  Wash 
ington  square,"  she  apologizes.  "  When  you  sweep 
around  and  north  through  the  great  arch  it  almost  seems 
as  if  you  were  passing  through  the  portals  of  New  York. 
It  is  one  of  the  few  parts  of  the  town  that  are  not  chang 
ing  rapidly." 


NEW  YORK  39 

For  Fifth  avenue  —  only  a  few  blocks  north  of  that 
stately  arch  —  has  begun  to  distintegrate  and  decay. 
Not  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  those  terms.  But  to 
those  who  remember  the  stately  street  of  fifteen  or 
twenty  years  ago  —  lined  with  the  simple  and  dig 
nified  homes  of  the  town  —  its  change  into  a  business 
thoroughfare  brings  keen  regrets.  Katherine  remem 
bers  that  she  read  in  a  book  that  there  are  today 
more  factory  workers  employed  in  Fifth  avenue  or 
close  to  it,  than  in  such  great  mill  cities  as  Lowell 
or  Lawrence  or  Fall  River,  and  when  you  ask  her  the 
reason  why  she  will  tell  you  how  these  great  buildings 
went  soaring  up  as  office-buildings,  without  office  ten 
ants  to  fill  them.  They  represent  speculation,  and  spec 
ulation  is  New  Yorkish.  But  speculation  in  wholesale 
cannot  afford  to  lose,  and  that  is  why  the  garment  manu 
facturers  and  many  others  of  their  sort  came  flocking 
to  the  great  retail  shopping  district  between  Fourth  and 
Seventh  avenues  and  Fourteenth  and  Thirty-fourth 
streets,  and  sent  the  shops  soaring  further  to  the  north. 
It  has  been  expensive  business  throughout,  doubly  ex 
pensive,  because  absolutely  unnecessary.  Some  of  the 
great  retail  houses  of  New  York  built  modern  and  elab 
orate  structures  south  of  Thirty-fourth  street  within 
the  past  twenty  years  in  the  firm  belief  that  the  retail 
shopping  section  had  been  fixed  for  the  next  half  cen 
tury.  But  the  new  stores  had  hardly  been  opened  be 
fore  the  deluge  of  manufacturing  came  upon  them. 
Shoppers  simply  would  not  mix  with  factory  hands  upon 
lower  Fifth  avenue  and  the  side  streets  leading  from  it. 
And  so  the  shop-keepers  have  had  to  move  north  and 
build  anew.  And  just  what  a  tax  such  moving  has  been 
upon  the  consumer  no  one  has  ever  had  the  audacity 
to  estimate. 

"  They  should  have  known  that  nothing  ever  stays 
fixed  in  New  York/'  says  Katherine.     "  We  are  a  rest- 


40      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

less  folk,  who  make  a  restless  city.  Stay  fixed?  Did 
you  notice  the  station  at  which  you  entered  today  ?  " 

Of  course  you  did.  The  new  Grand  Central,  with  its 
marvelous  blue  ceiling  capping  a  waiting-room  so  large 
that  the  New  York  City  Hall,  cupola,  wings  and  all 
could  be  set  within  it,  can  hardly  escape  the  attention 
of  any  traveler  who  passes  within  its  portals. 

"  It  is  the  greatest  railroad  station  in  the  world,"  she 
continues,  "  and  yet  I  have  read  in  the  newspapers  that 
Commodore  Vanderbilt  built  on  that  very  plat  of  ground 
in  1871  the  largest  station  in  the  world  for  the  accom 
modation  of  his  railroads.  He  thought  that  it  would 
last  for  all  time.  In  forty  years  the  wreckers  were  pull 
ing  it  down.  It  was  outgrown,  utterly  outgrown  and 
they  were  carting  it  off  piece  by  piece  to  the  rubbish 
heaps." 

She  turns  suddenly  upon  you. 

"  That  is  typical  of  our  restless,  lovely  city,"  she  tells 
you.  And  you,  yourself,  have  heard  that  only  two 
years  ago  they  tore  down  a  nineteen  story  building  at 
Wall  and  Nassau  streets  so  that  they  might  replace  it 
by  another  of  the  towers  —  this  one  thirty  stories  in 
height. 

The  conductor  of  the  green  omnibus  thrusts  his  green 
fare-box  under  your  nose.  You  find  two  dimes  and  drop 
it  into  the  contrivance. 

"  You  can  get  more  value  for  less  money  and  less 
value  for  much  money  in  New  York  than  in  any  other 
large  city  in  the  world,"  says  Katherine. 

She  is  right  —  and  you  know  that  she  is  right.  You 
can  have  a  glorious  ride  up  the  street,  that  even  in  its 
days  of  social  decadence  is  still  the  finest  highway  in 
the  land  —  a  ride  that  continues  across  the  town  and  up 
its  parked  rim  for  long  miles  —  for  a  mere  ten  cents  of 
Uncle  Sam's  currency  and  as  for  the  reverse  —  well  you 


NEW  YORK  41 

are  going  to  dinner  in  a  smart  hotel  with  Katherine  in 
a  little  while. 

You  swing  across  Broadway  and  up  the  west  edge  of 
Madison  square,  catch  a  single,  wondering  close-at-hand 
glimpse  of  the  white  campanile  of  the  Metropolitan  tower 
which  dominates  that  open  place  and  so  all  but  re 
places  Diana  on  her  perch  above  Madison  Square  Gar 
den  —  a  landmark  of  the  New  York  of  a  quarter  of  a 
century  ago  and  which  is  apt  to  come  into  the  hands 
of  the  wreckers  almost  any  day  now.  Now  you  are  at 
the  south  edge  of  the  new  shopping  district,  although 
some  of  the  ultra  places  below  Thirty-fourth  street  have 
begun  to  move  into  that  portion  of  the  avenue  just  south 
of  Central  Park.  In  a  little  while  they  may  be  stealing 
up  the  loveliest  portion  of  the  avenue  —  from  Fifty- 
ninth  street  north. 

The  great  shops  dominate  the  avenue.  And  if  you 
look  with  sharp  eyes  as  the  green  bus  bears  you  up  this 
via  sacre,  you  may  see  that  one  of  the  greatest  ones  — 
a  huge  department  store  encased  in  architecturally  su 
perb  white  marble  —  bears  no  sign  or  token  of  its  owner 
ship  or  trade.  An  oversight,  you  think.  Not  a  bit  of 
it.  Four  blocks  farther  up  the  avenue  is  another  great 
store  in  white  marble  —  a  jewelry  shop  of  international 
reputation.  You  will  have  to  scan  its  broad  fagade 
closely  indeed  before  you  find  the  name  of  the  firm  in 
tiny  letters  upon  the  face  of  its  clock.  Oversight?  Not 
a  bit  of  it.  It  is  the  ultra  of  shop-keeping  in  New  York 
—  the  assumption  that  the  shop  is  so  well  known  that 
it  need  not  be  placarded  to  the  vulgar  world.  And  if 
strangers  from  other  points  fail  to  identify  it  —  well 
that  is  because  of  their  lack  of  knowledge  and  the  shop 
keeper  may  secretly  rejoice. 

But,  after  all,  it  is  the  little  shops  that  mark  the  char 
acter  of  Fifth  avenue  —  not  its  great  emporiums.  It  is 
the  little  millinery  shops  where  an  engaging  creature  in 


42      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

black  and  white  simpers  toward  you  and  calls  you,  if 
you  are  of  the  eternal  feminine,  "  my  dear;  "  the  jewelry 
shops  where  the  lapidary  rises  from  his  lathe  and 
offers  a  bit  of  craftsmanship;  the  rare  galleries  that 
run  from  old  masters  to  modern  etchers ;  specialty  shops, 
filled  top  to  bottom  with  toys  or  Persian  rugs,  or 
women's  sweaters,  or  foreign  magazines  and  books,  that 
render  to  Fifth  avenue  its  tremendous  cosmopolitanism. 
These  little  shops  make  for  personality.  There  is  some 
thing  in  the  personal  contact  between  the  proprietor  and 
the  customer  that  makes  mere  barter  possess  a  real  fas 
cination.  And  if  you  do  pay  two  or  three  times  the  real 
value  in  the  little  shop  you  have  just  so  much  more  fun 
out  of  the  shopping.  And  there  are  times  when  real 
treasures  may  come  out  of  their  stores. 

"  Look  at  the  cornices,"  interrupts  Katherine.  "  Mr. 
Arnold  Bennett  says  that  they  are  the  most  wonderful 
things  in  all  New  York." 

Katherine  may  strain  her  neck,  looking  at  cornices 
if  she  so  wills.  As  for  you,  the  folk  who  promenade 
the  broad  sidewalks  are  more  worth  your  while.  There 
are  more  of  them  upon  the  west  walk  than  upon  the  east 
—  for  some  strange  reason  that  has  long  since  brought 
about  a  similar  phenomenon  upon  Broadway  and  sent 
west  side  rents  high  above  those  upon  the  east.  Fifth 
avenue  thrusts  its  cosmopolitanism  upon  you,  not  alone 
in  her  shops,  with  their  wonderfully  varied  offerings, 
but  in  the  very  humans  who  tread  her  pavements.  The 
New  York  girl  may  not  always  be  beautiful  but  she  is 
rarely  anything  but  impeccable.  And  if  in  the  one  in 
stance  she  is  extreme  in  her  styles,  in  the  next  she  is 
apt  to  be  severe  in  her  simplicity  of  dress.  And  it  is 
difficult  to  tell  to  which  ordinary  preference  should  go. 
These  girls  —  girls  in  a  broad  sense  all  the  way  from  trim 
children  in  charge  of  maid  or  governess  to  girls  whose 
pinkness  of  skin  defies  the  graying  of  their  locks  —  a 


NEW  YORK  43 

sprinkling  of  men,  not  always  so  faultless  in  dress  or 
manner  as  their  sisters  —  and  you  have  the  Fifth  avenue 
crowd.  Then  between  these  two  quick  moving  files  of 
pedestrians  —  set  at  all  times  in  the  rapid  tempo  of  New 
York  —  a  quadruple  file  of  carriages ;  the  greater  part 
of  them  motor  driven. 

Traffic  in  Fifth  avenue,  like  traffic  almost  everywhere 
else  in  New  York  is  a  problem  increasing  in  perplexity. 
A  little  while  ago  the  situation  was  met  and  for  a  time 
improved  by  slicing  off  the  fronts  of  the  buildings  — 
perhaps  the  most  expensive  shave  that  the  town  has  ever 
known  —  and  setting  back  the  sidewalks  six  or  eight 
feet.  But  the  benefits  then  gained  have  already  been 
over-reached  and  the  traffic  policeman  at  the  street 
corners  all  the  way  up  the  avenue  must  possess  rare  wit 
and  diplomacy  —  while  their  fellows  at  such  corners  as 
Thirty-fourth  and  Forty-second  are  hardly  less  than  field 
generals.  And  with  all  the  finesse  of  their  work  the 
traffic  moves  like  molasses.  Long  double  and  triple  files 
of  touring  cars  and  limousines,  the  combined  cost  of 
which  would  render  statistics  such  as  would  gladden 
the  heart  of  a  Sunday  editor,  make  their  way  up  and 
down  the  great  street  tediously.  If  a  man  is  in  a  hurry 
he  has  no  business  even  to  essay  the  Avenue.  And  oc 
casionally  the  whole  tangle  is  double-tangled.  The 
shriek  of  a  fire-engine  up  a  side  street  or  the  clang  of  an 
ambulance  demanding  a  clear  right-of-way  makes  the 
traffic  question  no  easier.  Yet  the  policemen  at  the  street 
corners  are  not  caught  unawares.  With  the  shrill  com 
mands  of  their  own  whistles  they  maneuver  trucks  and 
automobiles  and  even  some  old-fashioned  hansom  cabs, 
pedestrians,  all  the  rest  —  as  coolly  and  as  evenly  as  if 
it  had  been  rehearsed  for  whole  weeks. 

New  York  is  wonderful,  the  traffic  of  its  chief  show 
street  —  for   Fifth   avenue  can   now  be   fairly   said   to 


44      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

have  usurped  Broadway  as  the  main  highway  of  the 
upper  city  —  tremendous.  You  begin  to  compute  what 
must  be  the  rental  values  upon  this  proud  section  of  Fifth 
avenue,  as  it  climbs  Murray  Hill  from  Thirty-fourth 
street  to  Forty-second  street,  when  Katherine  interrupts 
you  once  again.  She  knows  her  New  York  thoroughly 
indeed. 

"  Do  you  notice  that  house  ?  "  she  demands. 

You  follow  her  glance  to  a  very  simple  brick  house, 
upon  the  corner  of  an  inconsequential  side  street.  Beside 
it  on  Fifth  avenue  is  an  open  lot  —  of  perhaps  fifty  feet 
frontage,  giving  to  the  avenue  but  a  plain  brown  wooden 
fence. 

"  A  corking  building  lot,"  you  venture,  "  Why  don't 
they—" 

"  I  expected  you  to  say  that,"  she  laughs.  "  They  have 
wanted  to  build  upon  that  lot  —  time  and  time  again. 
But  when  they  approach  the  owner  he  laughs  at  them 
and  declines  to  consider  any  offer.  '  My  daughter  has 
a  little  dog,'  he  says  politely,  '  It  must  have  a  place  for 
exercise.'  We  New  Yorkers  are  an  odd  lot,"  she  laughs. 
"  You  know  that  the  Goelets  kept  a  cow  in  the  lawn  of 
their  big  house  at  Broadway  and  Nineteenth  street  until 
almost  twenty  years  ago  —  until  there  was  not  a  square 
foot  of  grass  outside  of  a  park  within  five  miles.  And 
in  New  York  the  man  who  can  do  the  odd  thing  suc 
cessfully  is  apt  to  be  applauded.  You  could  not  imagine 
such  a  thing  in  Boston  or  Baltimore  or  Philadelphia, 
could  you  ?  " 

You  admit  that  your  imagination  would  fall  short  of 
such  heights  and  ask  Katherine  if  you  are  going  up  to 
the  far  end  of  the  'bus  run  —  to  that  great  group  of 
buildings  —  university,  cathedral,  hospital,  divinity 
school  —  that  have  been  gathered  j  ust  beyond  the  north 
western  corner  of  Central  Park. 

"  No,  I  think  not,"  she  quickly  decides,  "  You  know 


NEW  YORK  45 

that  Columbia  is  not  to  New  York  as  Havard  is  to 
Boston.  Harvard  dominates  Boston,  Columbia  is  but 
a  peg  in  the  educational  system  of  New  York.  The 
best  families  here  do  not  bow  to  its  fetich.  They  are 
quite  as  apt  to  send  their  boys  to  Yale  or  Princeton  — 
even  Harvard." 

"  Then  there's  the  cathedral  and  the  Drive,"  you  ven 
ture. 

"  We  have  a  cathedral  right  here  on  Fifth  avenue  that 
is  finished  and,  in  its  way,  quite  as  beautiful.  And  as 
for  the  Drive  —  it  is  merely  a  rim  of  top-heavy  and 
expensive  apartment  houses.  The  West  Side  is  no 
longer  extremely  smart.  The  truth  of  the  matter  is 
that  we  must  pause  for  afternoon  tea." 

You  ignore  that  horrifying  truth  for  an  instant. 

"  What  has  happened  to  the  poor  West  Side  ?  "  you  de 
mand. 

Katherine  all  but  lowers  her  voice  to  a  whisper. 

"  Twenty  years  ago  and  it  had  every  promise  of  suc 
cess.  It  looked  as  if  Riverside  Drive  would  surpass  the 
Avenue  as  a  street  of  fine  residences.  The  side  streets 
were  preeminently  nice.  Then  came  the  subway  —  and 
with  it  the  apartment  houses.  After  that  the  very  nice 
folk  began  moving  to  the  side  streets  in  the  upper  Fifties, 
the  Sixties  and  the  Seventies  between  Park  and  Fifth  ave 
nues." 

"  Suppose  that  the  apartment  houses  should  begin  to 
drift  in  there  —  in  any  numbers  ?  "  you  demand. 

"  Lord  knows,"  says  Katherine,  and  with  due  rever 
ence  adds :  "  There  is  the  last  stand  of  the  prosperous 
New  Yorker  with  an  old-fashioned  notion  that  he  and 
his  would  like  to  live  in  a  detached  house.  The  Park 
binds  him  in  on  the  West,  the  tenement  district  and  Lex 
ington  avenue  on  the  East  —  to  the  North  Harlem  and 
the  equally  impossible  Bronx.  The  old  guard  is  stand 
ing  together." 


46      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

"  There  is  Brooklyn  ?  "  you  venture. 

"  No  New  Yorker,"  says  Katherine,  with  withering 
scorn,  "  ever  goes  publicly  to  Brooklyn  unless  he  is 
being  buried  in  Greenwood  cemetery." 

Tea  for  you  is  being  served  in  a  large  mausoleum  of 
a  white  hotel  —  excessively  white  from  a  profuse  use  of 
porcelain  tiles  which  can  be  washed  occasionally  —  of 
most  extraordinary  architecture.  Some  day  some  one 
is  going  to  attempt  an  analysis  of  hotel  architecture  in 
New  York  and  elsewhere  in  the  U.  S.  A.  but  this  is  not 
the  time  and  place.  Suffice  it  to  say  here  and  now  that 
you  finally  found  a  door  entering  the  white  porcelain 
mausoleum.  What  a  feast  awaited  your  eyes  —  as  well 
as  your  stomach  —  within.  Rooms  of  rose  pink  and 
rooms  of  silver  gray,  Persian  rooms,  Japanese  rooms, 
French  rooms  in  the  several  varieties  of  Louis,  Greek 
rooms  —  Europe,  the  ancients  and  the  Orient,  have  been 
ransacked  for  the  furnishing  of  this  tavern.  And  in 
the  center  of  them  all  is  a  great  glass-enclosed  garden, 
filled  with  giant  palms  and  tiny  tables,  tremendous 
waiters  and  infinitesimal  chairs.  A  large  bland-faced 
employe  —  who  is  a  sort  of  sublimated  edition  of  the 
narrow  lean  hat-boys  who  we  shall  find  in  the  eating 
places  of  the  Broadway  theater  districts  —  divests  you 
of  your  outer  wraps.  You  elbow  past  a  band  and  ar 
rive  at  the  winter  garden.  A  head  waiter  in  an  instant 
glance  of  steel-blue  eyes  decides  that  you  are  fit  and 
finds  the  tiniest  of  the  tiny  tables  for  you.  It  is  so  far 
in  the  shade  of  the  sheltering  palm  that  you  have  to 
bend  almost  double  to  drink  your  tea  —  and  the  orches 
tra  is  rather  uncomfortably  near. 

Katherine  might  have  taken  you  to  other  tea  dispen 
saries  —  an  unusual  place  in  a  converted  stable  in 
Thirty-fourth  street,  another  stable  loft  in  West  Twenty- 
eighth  —  dozens  of  little  shops,  generally  feminine  to  an 


I 

I 


NEW  YORK  47 

intensified  degree,  which  combine  the  serving  of  tea 
with  the  vending  of  their  wares.  But  she  preferred  the 
big  white  hotel. 

"  Tea  at  the  Plaza  is  so  satisfactory  and  so  rest 
ful,"  she  says,  as  you  dodge  to  permit  two  ladies 
—  one  in  gray  silk  and  the  other  in  a  cut  of  blue 
cloth  that  gives  her  the  contour  of  a  magnified  frog  — 
to  slip  past  you  without  knocking  your  tea  out  of  your 
untrained  fingers.  "  We  might  have  gone  to  the  Man 
hattan  —  but  it's  so  filled  with  young  girls  and  the  chap 
pies  from  the  schools  —  the  Ritz  is  proper  but  dull,  so 
is  Sherry's  —  all  the  rest  more  or  less  impossible." 

She  rattles  on  —  the  matter  of  restaurants  is  al 
ways  dear  to  the  New  York  heart.  You  ignore  the  de 
tails. 

"  But  why?  "  you  demand. 

"  Why  what?  "  she  returns. 

"Why  tea?" 

You  explain  that  afternoon  tea  in  its  real  lair  —  Lon 
don  —  in  a  sort  of  climatic  necessity.  The  prevalence  of 
fog,  of  raw  damp  days,  makes  a  cup  of  hot  tea  a  real 
bracer  —  a  stimulant  that  carries  the  human  through 
another  two  or  three  hours  of  hard  existence  until  the 
late  London  dinner.  The  bracing  atmosphere  of  New 
York  —  with  more  clear  days  than  any  other  metropoli 
tan  city  in  the  world  —  does  not  need  tea.  You  say  so 
frankly. 

"  I  suppose  you  are  right,"  Katherine  concedes,  "  but 
we  have  ceased  in  this  big  city  to  rail  at  the  English. 
We  bow  the  knee  to  them.  The  most  fashionable  of  our 
newest  hotels  and  shops  run  —  absurdly  many  times  — 
to  English  ways.  And  afternoon  tea  has  long  since 
ceased  to  be  a  novelty  in  our  lives.  Why,  they  are  be 
ginning  to  serve  it  at  the  offices  downtown  —  just  as 
they  do  in  dear  old  London." 

You  swallow  hard  —  some  one  has  recommended  that 


48      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

to  you  as  a  method  of  suppressing  emotion  —  for  polite 
society  is  never  emotional. 


Dinner  is  New  York's  real  function  of  the  day.  And 
dinner  in  New  York  means  five  million  hungry  stomachs 
demanding  to  be  filled.  The  New  York  dinner  is  as 
cosmopolitan  as  the  folk  who  dwell  on  the  narrow  is 
land  of  Manhattan  and  the  two  other  islands  that  press 
closely  to  it.  The  restaurant  and  hotel  dinners  are  as 
cosmopolitan  as  the  others.  Of  course,  for  the  sake  of 
brevity,  if  for  no  other  reason,  you  must  eliminate  the 
home  dinners  —  and  read  "  home  "  as  quickly  into  the  cold 
and  heavy  great  houses  of  the  avenue  as  into  the  little 
clusters  of  rooms  in  crowded  East  Side  tenements  where 
poverty  is  never  far  away  and  next  week's  meals  a  real 
problem.  And  remember,  that  to  dine  even  in  a  reason 
ably  complete  list  of  New  York's  famous  eating  places 
—  a  new  one  every  night  —  would  take  you  more  than 
a  year.  At  the  best  your  vision  of  them  must  be  desul 
tory. 

Six  o'clock  sees  the  New  York  business  army  well  on 
its  way  toward  home  —  the  seething  crowds  at  the 
Brooklyn  bridge  terminal  in  Park  Row,  the  overloaded 
subway  straining  to  move  its  fearful  burden,  the  ferry 
and  the  railroad  terminals  focal  points  of  great  attract 
iveness.  To  make  a  single  instance:  take  that  division 
of  the  army  that  dwells  in  Brooklyn.  It  begins  its  march 
dinnerward  a  little  after  four  o'clock,  becomes  a  push 
ing,  jostling  mob  a  little  later  and  shows  no  sign  of 
abatement  until  long  after  six.  Within  that  time  the 
railroad  folk  at  the  Park  Row  terminal  of  the  old  bridge 
have  received,  classified  and  despatched  Brooklynward, 
more  than  one  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  persons  — 
the  population  of  a  city  almost  the  size  of  Syracuse. 


NEW  YORK  49 

And  the  famous  old  bridge  is  but  one  of  four  direct 
paths  from  Manhattan  to  Brooklyn. 

Six  o'clock  sees  restaurants  and  cafes  alight  and  ready 
for  the  two  or  three  hours  of  their  really  brisk  traffic  of 
the  day.  There  are  even  dinner  restaurants  downtown, 
remarkably  good  places  withal  and  making  especial  ap 
peal  to  those  overworked  souls  who  are  forced  to  stay 
at  the  office  at  night.  There  are  bright  lights  in  China 
town  where  innumerable  "  Tuxedos "  and  "  Port  Ar 
thurs  "  are  beginning  to  prepare  the  chop-suey  in  im 
maculate  Mongolian  kitchens.  But  the  real  restaurant 
district  for  the  diner-out  hardly  begins  south  of  Madison 
square.  There  are  still  a  very  few  old  hotels  in  Broad 
way  south  of  that  point  —  a  lessening  company  each 
year  —  one  or  two  in  close  proximity  to  Washington 
square.  Two  of  these  last  make  a  specialty  of  French 
cooking  —  their  table  d'hotes  are  really  famous  —  and 
perhaps  you  may  fairly  say  when  you  are  done  at  them 
that  you  have  eaten  at  the  best  restaurants  in  all  New 
York.  From  them  Fifth  avenue  runs  a  straight  course 
to  the  newer  hotels  far  to  the  north  —  a  silent  brilliantly 
lighted  street  as  night  comes  "  with  the  double  row 
of  steel-blue  electric  lamps  resembling  torch-bearing 
monks  "  one  brilliant  New  York  writer  has  put  it.  But 
before  the  newest  of  the  new  an  intermediate  era  of 
hotels,  the  Holland,  the  nearby  Imperial  and  the  Wal 
dorf-Astoria  chief  among  these.  The  Waldorf  has  been 
from  the  day  it  first  opened  its  doors  —  more  than 
twenty  years  ago  —  New  York's  really  representative 
hotel.  Newer  hostelries  have  tried  to  wrest  that  honor 
from  it  —  but  in  vain.  It  has  clung  jealously  to  its  rep 
utation.  The  great  dinners  of  the  town  are  held  in  its 
wonderful  banqueting  halls,  the  well-known  men  of  New 
York  are  constantly  in  its  corridors.  It  is  club  and  more 
than  club  —  it  is  a  clearing-house  for  all  of  the  best 


50      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

clubs.  It  is  the  focal  center  for  the  hotel  life  of  the 
town. 

There  is  an  important  group  of  hotels  in  the  rather 
spectacular  neighborhood  of  Times  square  —  the  Astor, 
with  its  distinctly  German  flavor,  and  the  Knickerbocker 
which  whimsically  likes  to  call  itself  "  the  country  club 
on  Forty-second  street "  distinctive  among  them.  And 
ranging  upon  upper  Fifth  avenue,  or  close  to  it,  are  other 
important  houses,  the  Belmont,  the  aristocratic  Man 
hattan,  the  ultra-British  Ritz-Carlton,  the  St.  Regis,  the 
Savoy,  the  Netherland,  the  Plaza,  and  the  Gotham.  In 
between  these  are  those  two  impeccable  restaurants  — 
so  distinctive  of  New  York  and  so  long  wrapped  up  in 
its  history  —  Sherry's  and  Delmonico's. 

Over  in  the  theatrical  brilliancy  of  Broadway  up  and 
down  from  Times  square  are  other  restaurants  —  Shan- 
ley's,  Churchill's,  Murray's  —  the  list  is  constantly  chang 
ing.  A  fashionable  restaurant  in  New  York  is  either 
tremendously  successful  —  or  else,  as  we  shall  later  see, 
they  are  telephoning  for  the  sheriff.  And  the  last  out 
come  is  apt  more  to  follow  than  the  first.  For  it  is  a 
tremendous  undertaking  to  launch  a  restaurant  in  these 
days.  The  decorations  of  the  great  dining-rooms  must 
rival  those  of  a  Versailles  palace  while  the  so-called  minor 
appointments  —  silver,  linen,  china  and  the  rest  must  be 
as  faultless  as  in  any  great  house  upon  Fifth  avenue. 
The  first  cost  is  staggering,  the  upkeep  a  steady  drain. 
There  is  but  one  opportunity  for  the  proprietor  —  and 
that  opportunity  is  in  his  charges.  And  when  you  come 
to  dine  in  one  of  these  showy  uptown  places  you  will 
find  that  he  has  not  missed  his  opportunity. 

All  New  York  that  dines  out  does  not  make  for  these 
great  places  or  their  fellows.  There  are  little  restau 
rants  that  cast  a  glamour  over  their  poor  food  by  thrust 
ing  out  hints  of  a  magic  folk  named  Bohemians  who  dine 
night  after  night  at  their  dirty  tables.  There  are  others 


NEW  YORK  51 

who  with  a  Persian  name  seek  to  allure  the  ill-informed, 
some  stout  German  places  giving  the  substantial  cheer 
of  the  Fatherland,  beyond  them  restaurants  phrasing 
themselves  in  the  national  dishes  and  the  cooking  of 
every  land  in  the  world,  save  our  own.  For  a  real 
American  restaurant  is  hard  to  find  in  New  York  — 
real  American  dishes  treats  of  increasing  rarity.  A 
great  hotel  recently  banished  steaks  from  its  bills-of-fare, 
another  has  placed  the  ban  on  pie ;  and  as  for  strawberry 
short-cake  —  just  ask  for  strawberry  short-cake.  The 
concoction  that  the  waiter  will  set  before  you  will  have 
you  hesitating  between  tears  and  laughter  —  ridicule  for 
the  pitiful  attempts  of  a  French  cook  and  tears  for  your 
thoughts  of  the  tragedy  that  has  overwhelmed  an  Amer 
ican  institution.  Some  day  some  one  is  going  to  build 
a  hotel  with  the  American  idea  standing  back  of  it  right 
in  the  heart  of  New  York.  He  is  going  to  have  the 
bravery  or  the  patriotism  to  call  it  the  American  House 
or  the  United  States  Hotel  or  Congress  Hall  or  some 
other  title  that  means  something  quite  removed  from  the 
aristocratic  nomenclature  that  our  modern  generation 
of  tavern-keepers  have  borrowed  from  Europe  without 
the  slightest  sense  of  fitness;  and  to  that  man  shall 
be  given  more  than  mere  riches  —  the  satisfaction  that 
will  come  to  him  from  having  accomplished  a  real 
work. 

The  truth  of  the  matter  is  that  we  have  borrowed  more 
than  nomenclature  from  Europe.  We  have  taken  the 
so-called  "  European  plan  "  with  all  of  its  disadvantages 
and  none  of  its  advantages.  We  have  done  away  with 
the  stuffy  over-eating  "  American  plan  "  and  have  made 
a  rule  of  "  pay-as-you-go  "  that  is  quite  all  right  —  and 
is  not.  For  to  the  simple  "  European  plan  "  has  recently 
been  added  many  complications.  In  other  days  the  gen 
erosity  of  the  portions  in  a  New  York  hotel  was  famous. 
A  single  portion  of  any  important  dish  was  ample  for 


52     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

two.  Your  smiling  old-fashioned  waiter  told  you  that. 
The  waiter  in  a  New  York  restaurant  today  does  not 
smile.  He  merely  tells  you  that  the  food  is  served  "  per 
portion "  which  generally  means  that  an  unnecessary 
amount  of  food  is  prepared  in  the  kitchen  and  sent  from 
the  table,  uneaten,  as  waste.  And  a  smart  New  York 
restauranteur  recently  made  a  "  cover  charge "  of 
twenty-five  cents  for  bread  and  butter  and  ice-water. 
Others  followed.  It  will  not  be  long  before  a  smarter 
restauranteur  will  make  the  "  cover  charge  "  fifty  cents, 
and  then  folk  will  begin  streaming  into  his  place.  They 
don't  complain.  That's  not  the  New  York  way. 

They  do  not  even  complain  of  the  hat-boys  —  blood 
thirsty  little  brigands  who  snatch  your  hat  and  other 
wraps  before  you  enter  a  restaurant.  The  brigands  are 
skillfully  chosen  —  lean,  hungry  little  boys  every  time, 
never  fat,  sleek,  well-fed  looking  little  boys.  They  are 
employed  by  a  trust,  which  rents  the  "  hat-checking 
privilege  "  from  the  proprietor  of  the  hotel  or  restaur 
ant.  The  owner  of  the  trust  pays  well  for  these  privi 
leges  and  the  little  boys  must  work  hard  to  bring  him 
back  his  rental  fees  and  a  fair  profit  beside. 

Leave  that  to  them.  Emerge  from  a  restaurant,  well- 
fed  and  at  peace  with  the  world  and  deny  that  lean-look 
ing,  swarthy-faced,  black-eyed  boy  a  quarter  if  you  can  — 
or  dare.  A  dime  is  out  of  the  question.  He  might  in 
sult  you,  probably  would.  But  a  quarter  buys  your  self- 
respect  and  the  head  of  the  trust  a  share  in  his  new  mo 
tor  car.  The  lean-looking  boy  buys  no  motor  cars.  He 
works  on  a  salary  and  there  are  no  pockets  in  his  uni 
form.  There  is  a  stern-visaged  cicerone  in  the  back 
ground  and  to  the  cicerone  roll  all  the  quarters,  but  the 
New  Yorker  does  not  complain  —  save  when  he  reaches 
Los  Angeles  or  Atlanta  or  some  other  fairly  distant 
place  and  finds  the  same  sort  of  highway  brigandage 
in  effect  there. 


NEW  YORK  53 

VI 

After  the  dinner  and  the  hat-boy  —  the  theater.  You 
suggest  the  theater  to  Katherine.  She  is  enthusiastic. 
You  pick  the  theater.  It  is  close  at  hand  and  you 
quickly  find  your  way  to  it.  A  gentleman,  whose  polite 
ness  is  of  a  variety,  somewhat  frappe,  awaits  you  in  the 
box-office.  A  line  of  hopeful  mortals  is  shuffling  toward 
him,  to  disperse  with  hope  left  behind.  But  this  antici 
pates. 

You  inquire  of  the  man  in  the  box-office  for  two  seats 
—  two  particularly  good  seats.  You  remember  going  to 
the  theater  in  Indianapolis  once  upon  a  time,  a  stranger, 
and  having  been  seated  behind  the  fattest  theater  pillar 
that  you  could  have  ever  possibly  imagined.  But  you 
need  not  worry  about  the  pillars  in  this  New  York  play 
house.  The  box-office  gentleman,  whose  thoughts  seem 
to  be  a  thousand  miles  away,  blandly  replies  that  the 
house  is  sold  out. 

"  So  good  ? "  you  brashly  venture.  You  had  not 
fancied  this  production  so  successful.  He  does  not  even 
assume  to  hear  your  comment.  You  decide  that  you  will 
see  this  particular  play  at  a  later  time.  You  suggest  as 
much  to  the  indifferent  creature  behind  the  wicket.  He 
replies  by  telling  you  that  he  can  only  give  you  tickets 
for  a  Monday  or  Tuesday  three  weeks  hence  —  and  then 
nothing  ahead  of  the  seventeenth  row.  Can  he  not  do 
better  than  that?  He  cannot.  He  is  positive  that  he 
cannot.  And  his  positiveness  is  Gibraltarian  in  its  im 
mobility.  A  faint  sign  of  irritation  covers  his  bland 
face.  He  wants  you  to  see  that  you  are  taking  too  much 
of  his  time. 

Katherine  saves  the  situation.  She  whispers  to  you 
that  she  noticed  a  little  shop  nearby  with  a  sign  "  Tickets 
for  all  Theaters  "  displayed  upon  it. 

"  You  know  they  abolished  the  speculators  two  years 
ago,"  she  explains. 


54     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

You  move  on  to  the  little  shop  with  the  inviting  sign. 
The  gentleman  behind  its  counters  has  manners  at  least. 
He  greets  you  with  the  smile  of  the  professional  shop 
keeper. 

"  Have  you  tickets  for  '  The  Giddiest  Girl'?  "  you  in 
quire. 

He  smiles  ingratiatingly.  Of  course  he  has,  for  any 
night  and  anywhere  you  wish  them. 

"  What  is  the  price  of  them  ?  " 

You  are  not  coldly  commercial  but,  despite  that  smile, 
merely  apprehensive.  And  you  are  beginning  to  under 
stand  New  York. 

"  Four  dollars." 

Not  so  bad  at  that  —  just  the  box-office  price.  You 
bring  out  four  greasy  one-dollar  bills.  His  eyes  fixed 
upon  them,  he  places  a  ticket  down  upon  the  counter. 

"  There  —  there  are  two  of  us,"  you  stammer. 

He  does  not  stammer. 

"  Do  you  think  that  they  are  four  dollars  a  dozen  ?  " 
he  sallies. 

You  give  him  a  ten  dollar  bill  this  time.  You  do  not 
kick.  Even  though  the  show  is  perfectly  rotten  and  the 
usherette  charges  you  ten  cents  for  a  poorly  printed  pro 
gram  and  scowls  because  you  take  the  change  from  her 
itching  palm,  do  not  complain.  You  would  not  com 
plain  even  if  you  knew  that  the  man  in  the  chair  next 
to  you  paid  only  the  regular  prices,  because  he  happened 
to  belong  to  the  same  lodge  as  the  cousin  of  the  treas 
urer  of  the  theater,  while  the  man  in  the  chair  next  to 
Katherine  paid  nothing  at  all  for  his  seat  —  having  a 
relative  who  advertises  in  the  theater  programs.  You 
do  not  kick.  Complaint  has  long  since  been  eliminated 
from  the  New  York  code  and  you  have  begun  to  realize 
that. 

After  the  theater,  another  restaurant  —  this  time  for 


NEW  YORK  55 

supper  —  more  hat-boys,  more  brigandage  but  it  is  the 
thing  to  do  and  you  must  do  it.  And  you  must  do  it 
well.  Splendor  costs  and  you  pay  —  your  full  propor 
tion.  If  up  in  your  home  town  you  know  a  nice  little 
place  where  you  can  drop  in  after  the  show  at  the  local 
playhouse  and  have  a  glass  of  beer  and  a  rarebit  —  dis 
miss  that  as  a  prevailing  idea  in  the  neighborhood  of 
Long  Acre  square.  The  White  Light  district  of  Broad 
way  can  buy  no  motor  cars  on  the  beer  and  rarebit  trade. 
Louey's  trade  in  his  modest  little  place  up  home  is  suf 
ficient  to  keep  him  in  moderate  living  year  in  and  year 
out,  but  Louey  does  not  have  to  pay  Broadway  ground 
rent,  or  Broadway  prices  for  food-stuffs  or  Broadway 
salaries  —  to  say  nothing  of  having  a  thirst  for  a 
bigger  and  faster  automobile  than  his  neighbor.  And 
as  we  have  said,  the  opportunity  for  bankruptcy  in  the 
so-called  "  lobster  palaces  "  of  Broadway  runs  high.  As 
this  is  being  written,  one  of  the  most  famous  of  them  has 
collapsed. 

Its  proprietor  —  he  was  a  smart  caterer  come  east 
from  Chicago  where  he  had  made  his  place  fashionable 
and  himself  fairly  rich  —  for  a  dozen  years  ran  a  pros 
perous  restaurant  within  a  stone-throw  of  the  tall  white 
shaft  of  the  Times  building.  And  even  if  the  heels  were 
the  highest,  the  gowns  the  lowest,  the  food  was  impec 
cable  and  if  you  knew  New  York  at  all  you  knew  who 
went  there.  It  was  gay  and  beautiful  and  high-priced. 
It  was  immensely  popular.  Then  the  proprietor  listened 
to  sirens.  They  commanded  him  to  tear  down  the  simple 
structure  of  his  restaurant  and  there  build  a  towering 
hotel.  He  obeyed  orders.  With  the  magic  of  New 
York  builders  the  new  building  was  ready  within  the 
twelvemonth.  It  represented  all  that  might  be  desired 
—  or  that  upper  Broadway  at  least  might  desire  —  in 
modern  hotel  construction. 

But   it  could  not   succeed.     A   salacious   play   which 


56      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

made  a  considerable  commercial  success  took  its  title 
from  the  new  hotel  and  called  itself  "  The  Girl  from 

R Js."  That  was  the  last  straw.  It  might  have  been 

good  fun  for  the  man  from  Baraboo  or  the  man  from 
Jefferson  City  to  come  to  New  York  and  dine  quietly 

and  elegantly  at  R 's,  but  to  stop  at  R 's  hotel, 

to  have  his  mail  sent  there,  to  have  the  local  paper  report 
that  he  was  registered  at  that  really  splendid  hostelry 
—  ah,  that  was  a  different  matter,  indeed.  Your  Bara 
boo  citizen  had  some  fairly  conservative  connections  — 
church  and  business  —  and  he  took  no  risks.  The  new 
hotel  went  bankrupt.* 

Beer  and  rarebits,  indeed.  Sam  Blythe  tells  of  the 
little  group  of  four  who  went  into  a  hotel  grillroom  not 
far  from  Forty-second  street  and  Broadway,  who  mildly 
asked  for  beer  and  rabbits. 

"  We  have  fine  partridges,"  said  the  head-waiter,  in 
sinuatingly. 

"  We  asked  for  beer  and  rabbits,"  insisted  the  host  of 
the  little  group.  He  really  did  not  know  his  New  York. 

"  We  have  fine  partridges,"  reiterated  the  head-waiter, 
then  yawned  slightly  behind  his  hand.  That  yawn  set 
tled  it.  The  head  of  the  party  was  bellicose.  He  lost 
his  temper  completely.  In  a  few  minutes  an  ambulance 
and  a  patrol  wagon  came  racing  up  Broadway.  But  the 
hotel  had  won.  It  always  does. 

One  thing  more  —  the  cabaret.  We  think  that  if  you 
are  really  fond  of  Katherine,  and  Katherine's  reputation, 
you  will  avoid  the  restaurants  that  make  a  specialty  of 
the  so-called  cabarets.  Really  good  restaurants  manage 
to  get  along  without  them.  And  the  very  best  that  can 
be  said  of  them  is  that  they  are  invariably  indifferently 
poor  —  a  melange  contributed  by  broken-down  actors  or 

*  Another  hotel  man  has  just  taken  the  property.    His  first  step 
has  been  to  change  its  name  and,  if  possible,  its  reputation. 

E.    H. 


NEW  YORK  57 

actresses,  or  boys  or  girls  stolen  from  the  possibilities 
of  a  really  decent  way  of  earning  a  living.  As  for  the 
worst,  it  is  enough  to  say  that  the  familiarity  that  be 
gins  by  breeding  contempt  follows  in  the  wake  of  the 
cabaret.  It  may  be  very  jolly  for  you,  of  a  lonely  sum 
mer  evening  in  New  York  and  forgetting  all  the  real 
pleasures  of  a  lonely  summer  night  in  the  big  town — • 
wonderful  orchestral  concerts  in  Central  Park,  dining  on 
open-air  terraces  and  cool  quiet  roofs,  motoring  off  to 
wonderful  shore  dinners  in  queer  old  taverns  —  to  hunt 
out  these  great  gay  places  in  the  heart  of  the  town. 
Easy  camaraderie  is  part  and  parcel  of  them.  But  you 
will  not  want  such  comrades  to  meet  any  of  the  Kath- 
erines  of  your  family.  And  therein  lies  a  more  than  sub 
tle  distinction. 

VII 

It  has  all  quite  dazed  you.  You  turn  toward  Katherine 
as  you  ride  home  with  her  in  the  taxicab  —  space  for 
bids  a  description  of  the  horrors  and  the  indignities  of 
the  taxicab  trust. 

"  Is  it  like  this  —  every  night  ?  "  you  feebly  ask. 

"  Every  night  of  the  year,"  she  replies.  "  And  typi 
cal  New  Yorkers  like  it." 

That  puts  a  brand-new  thought  into  your  mind. 

"  What  is  a  typical  New  Yorker  ?  "  you  demand. 

"  We  are  all  typical  New  Yorkers,"  she  laughs. 

It  is  a  foolish  answer  —  of  course.  But  the  strange 
part  of  the  whole  thing  is  that  Katherine  is  right.  Either 
there  are  no  typical  New  Yorkers  —  as  many  sane  folk 
solemnly  aver  —  or  else  every  one  who  tarries  in  the  city 
through  the  passing  of  even  a  single  night  is  a  typical 
New  Yorker.  How  can  it  be  else  in  a  city  who  is  still 
growing  like  a  girl  in  her  teens,  who  adds  to  herself  each 
year  in  permanent  population  135,000  human  beings, 
whose  transient  population  is  nightly  estimated  at  over 
a  hundred  thousand  ?  They  are  all  typical  New  Yorkers. 


58      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Here  is  Solomon  Strunsky  who  has  just  arrived 
through  Ellis  Island,  scared  and  forlorn,  with  his  scared 
and  forlorn  little  family  trailing  on  behind,  Solomon 
Strunsky  all  but  penniless,  and  the  merciless  home-sick 
ness  for  the  little  faraway  town  in  Polish  hills  tearing  at  his 
heart.  Is  Solomon  Strunsky  less  a  typical  New  Yorker 
than  the  scion  of  this  fine  old  family  which  for  sixty 
years  lived  and  died  in  a  red-brick  mansion  close  by 
Washington  square?  For  in  four  years  Solomon  Strun 
sky  will  be  keeping  his  own  little  store  in  the  East 
Side,  in  another  year  he  will  be  moving  his  brood  up  to 
a  fine  new  house  in  Harlem,  an  even  dozen  years  from 
the  entrance  at  Ellis  Island  and  you  may  be  reading  the 
proud  patronymic  of  Strunsky  spelled  along  a  signboard 
upon  one  of  the  great  new  commercial  barracks,  which, 
not  content  with  remaining  downtown,  began  the  de 
spoliation  of  Fifth  avenue  and  its  adjacent  retail  district. 
Can  you  keep  Solomon  Strunsky  out  of  the  family  of 
typical  New  Yorkers?  We  think  not. 

We  think  that  you  cannot  exclude  the  man  who  through 
some  stroke  of  fortune  has  accumulated  money  in  a 
smaller  city,  and  who  has  come  to  New  York  to  live 
and  to  spend  it.  There  are  many  thousands  of  him 
dwelling  upon  the  island  of  Manhattan;  with  his  fam 
ilies  they  make  a  considerable  community  by  itself. 
They  are  good  spenders,  good  New  Yorkers  in  that  they 
never  complain  while  the  strings  of  their  purses  are 
never  tightly  tied.  They  live  in  smart  apartments  up 
town,  at  tremendously  high  rentals,  keep  at  least  one 
car  in  service  at  all  seasons  of  the  year,  dine  luxuriously 
in  luxurious  eating-places,  attend  the  opera  once  a  week 
or  a  fortnight,  see  the  new  plays,  keep  abreast  of  the 
showy  side  of  New  York.  They  are  typical  New 
Yorkers.  In  an  apartment  a  little  further  down  the 
street  —  which  rents  at  half  the  figure  and  comes  danger 
ously  near  being  called  a  flat  —  is  another  family.  This 


NEW  YORK  59 

family  also  attends  the  new  plays,  although  it  is  far  more 
apt  to  go  a  floor  or  even  two  aloft,  than  to  meet  the  specu 
lator's  prices  for  orchestra  seats.  It  also  goes  to  the 
opera,  and  the  young  woman  of  the  house  is  in  deadly 
earnest  when  she  says  that  she  does  not  mind  standing 
through  the  four  or  five  long  acts  of  a  Wagnerian  mati 
nee,  because  the  nice  young  ushers  let  you  sit  on  the  floor 
in  the  intermissions.  But  this  family  goes  farther  than 
the  drama  —  spoken  or  sung.  It  is  conversant  with  the 
new  books  and  the  new  pictures.  That  same  young 
woman  swings  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa  key  of  the  most  dif 
ficult  institution  of  learning  on  this  continent.  And  she 
knows  more  about  the  trend  of  modern  art  than  half  of 
the  artists  themselves.  And  yet  she  "  goes  to  business  " 
—  is  the  capable  secretary  of  a  very  capable  man  down 
town. 

These  are  typical  New  Yorkers.  So  are  a  family  over 
in  the  next  block  —  theirs  is  frankly  a  flat  in  every  sense 
of  that  despised  word.  They  have  not  been  in  the 
theater  in  a  dozen  years,  never  in  one  of  the  big  modern 
restaurants  or  hotels.  Yet  the  head  of  that  family  is  a 
man  whose  name  is  known  and  spoken  reverently  through 
little  homes  all  the  way  across  America.  He  is  a 
worker  in  the  church,  although  not  a  clergyman,  a  mili 
tant  friend  of  education,  although  not  an  educator,  and 
he  believes  that  New  York  is  the  most  thoughtful  and 
benevolent  city  in  the  world.  And  if  you  attempt  to 
argue  with  him,  he  will  prove  easily  and  smilingly,  that 
he  is  right  and  you  —  are  just  mistaken.  He  and  his 
know  their  New  York  —  a  New  York  of  high  Christian 
force  and  precept  —  and  they,  too,  are  New  Yorkers. 

So,  too,  is  Bliffkins  and  the  little  Bliffkins  —  although 
Bliffkins  holds  property  in  a  bustling  Ohio  city  and  votes 
within  its  precincts.  To  tell  the  truth  baldly,  the  Bliff- 
kinses  descend  upon  New  York  once  each  year  and 
never  remain  more  than  a  fortnight.  But  they  stop  at 


60     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

a  great  hotel  and  they  are  great  spenders.  Floor 
walkers,  head-waiters,  head-ushers  know  them.  An 
nually,  and  for  a  few  golden  days  they  are  part  of  New 
York  —  typical  New  Yorkers,  if  you  please.  And  when 
they  are  gone  other  Bliffkinses,  from  almost  every  town 
across  the  land,  big  and  little,  come  to  replace  them. 
And  all  these  are  typical  New  Yorkers. 

What  is  the  typical  New  Yorker? 

Are  the  sane  folk  right  when  they  say  that  he  does  not 
exist?  We  do  not  think  so.  We  think  that  Katherine 
in  all  her  flippancy  was  right.  They  are  all  typical  New 
Yorkers  who  sojourn,  no  matter  for  how  little  a  time, 
within  her  boundaries.  We  will  go  farther  still.  You 
might  almost  say  that  all  Americans  are  typical  New 
Yorkers.  For  New  York  is,  in  no  small  sense,  America. 
Other  towns  and  cities  may  publicly  scoff  her,  down  in 
their  hearts  they  slavishly  imitate  her,  her  store  fronts, 
her  fashions,  her  hotel  and  her  theater  customs,  her 
policemen,  even  her  white-winged  street  cleaners.  They 
publicly  laugh  at  her  —  down  in  their  hearts  they  se 
cretly  adore  her. 


3 
ACROSS  THE  EAST  RIVER 

PHYSICALLY  only  the  East  river  separates  Brook 
lyn  from  Manhattan  island.  The  island  of  Man 
hattan  was  and  still  is  to  many  folk  the  city  of  New 
York.  Across  that  narrow  wale  of  the  East  river  —  one 
of  the  busiest  water-highways  in  all  the  world  —  men 
have  thrust  several  great  bridges  and  tunnels.  Politi 
cally  Brooklyn  and  Manhattan  are  one.  They  are  the 
most  important  boroughs  of  that  which  has  for  the  past 
fifteen  years  been  known  as  Greater  New  York. 

But  in  almost  every  other  way  Manhattan  and  Brook 
lyn  are  nearly  a  thousand  miles  apart.  In  social  customs, 
in  many  of  the  details  of  living  they  are  vastly  different, 
and  this  despite  the  fact  that  the  greater  part  of  the  male 
population  of  Brooklyn  daily  travels  to  Manhattan  is 
land  to  work  in  its  offices  and  shops  and  you  can  all  but 
toss  a  stone  from  one  community  into  the  other.  The 
very  fact  that  Brooklyn  is  a  dwelling  place  for  New 
York  —  professional  funny-men  long  ago  called  it  a 
"  bed-chamber  " —  has  done  much,  as  we  shall  see,  to 
ward  building  up  the  peculiar  characteristics  of  the 
town  that  stands  just  across  the  East  river  from  the  tip 
of  the  busiest  little  island  in  the  world. 

Consider  for  an  instant  the  situation  of  Brooklyn. 
It  fills  almost  the  entire  west  end  of  Long  island  —  a 
slightly  rolling  tract  of  land  between  a  narrow  and  un 
speakably  filthy  stream  on  the  north  known  as  Newtown 
creek  and  the  great  cool  ocean  on  the  south.  This  en 
tire  tract  has  for  many  years  been  known  as  Kings 

61 


62      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

county  —  its  name  a  slight  proof  of  its  antiquity.  Many 
years  ago  there  were  various  villages  in  the  old  county 
—  among  them  Greenpoint,  Bushwick,  Williamsburgh, 
Canarsie,  Flatbush,  Gravesend  and  Brooklyn.  They 
were  Dutch  towns,  and  you  can  still  see  some  evidences 
of  this  in  their  old  houses,  although  these  are  disappear 
ing  quite  rapidly  nowadays.  Brooklyn  grew  the  most 
rapidly  —  from  almost  the  very  day  of  the  establishment 
of  the  republic.  Robert  Fulton  developed  his  steam- 
ferry  and  the  East  river  ceased  to  be  the  bugaboo  it  had 
always  been  to  sailing  vessels.  Fulton  ferry  was  popu 
lar  from  the  first.  With  the  use  of  steam  its  importance 
waxed  and  soon  it  was  overcrowded.  Another  ferry 
came,  another  and  another  —  many,  many  others.  They 
were  all  crowded,  for  Brooklyn  was  growing,  a  close 
rim  of  houses  and  churches  and  shops  all  the  way  along 
the  bank  of  the  East  river  from  the  Navy  Yard  at  the 
sharp  crook  of  the  river  that  the  Dutch  called  the  Wall- 
about,  south  to  the  marshy  Gowanus  bay.  Upon  the 
river  shore,  north  of  the  Wallabout,  was  Williamsburgh, 
which  was  also  growing  and  which  had  been  incorpo 
rated  into  a  city.  But  when  the  horse-cars  came  and 
men  were  no  longer  forced  to  walk  to  and  from  the  fer 
ries  or  to  ride  in  miserable  omnibuses,  Brooklyn  and 
Williamsburgh  became  physically  one.  Williamsburgh 
then  gave  up  its  charter  and  its  identity  and  became  lost 
in  the  growth  of  a  greater  Brooklyn.  That  was  re 
peated  slowly  but  surely  throughout  all  Kings  county. 
Within  comparatively  recent  years  there  came  the  ele 
vated  railroad  —  at  almost  the  same  time  the  great  mir 
acle  of  the  Brooklyn  bridge  —  and  all  the  previous 
growth  of  the  town  was  as  nothing.  For  two  decades  it 
grew  as  rapidly  as  ever  grew  a  "  boom-town "  in  the 
West.  The  coming  of  electric  city  transportation,  the 
multiplying  of  bridges,  the  boring  of  the  first  East  river 
tunnel,  all  helped  in  this  great  growth.  But  the  fairy 


BROOKLYN  63 

web  of  steel  that  John  A.  Roebling  thrust  across  the 
busiest  part  of  the  East  river  marked  the  transformation 
of  Brooklyn  —  a  transformation  that  did  not  end  when 
Brooklyn  sold  her  political  birthright  and  became  part 
and  parcel  of  New  York.  That  transformation  is  still 
in  progress. 

We  have  slipped  into  history  because  we  have  wanted 
you  to  understand  why  Brooklyn  today  is  just  what  she 
is.  The  submerging  of  these  little  Dutch  villages  with 
their  individual  customs  and  traditions  has  done  its  part 
in  the  making  of  the  customs  and  traditions  of  the 
Brooklyn  of  today.  For  Brooklyn  today  remains  a  con 
gregation  of  separate  communities.  You  may  slip  from 
one  to  the  other  without  realizing  that  you  have  done 
more  than  pass  down  a  compactly  built  block  of  houses 
or  crossed  a  crowded  street. 

And  so  it  has  come  to  pass  that  Brooklyn  has  no  main 
street  —  in  the  sense  that  about  every  other  town  in  the 
United  States,  big  or  little,  has  a  main  street.  If  you 
wish  to  call  Fulton  street,  running  from  the  historic 
Fulton  ferry  right  through  the  heart  of  the  original  city 
and  far  out  into  the  open  country  a  main  street,  you  will 
be  forced  to  admit  that  it  is  the  ugliest  main  street  of  any 
town  in  the  land:  narrow,  inconsequential,  robbed  of  its 
light  and  air  by  a  low-hanging  elevated  railroad  almost 
its  entire  length.  And  yet  right  on  Fulton  street  you 
will  find  two  department-stores  unusually  complete  and 
unusually  well  operated.  New  Yorkers  come  to  them 
frequently  to  shop.  The  two  stores  seem  lost  in  the 
dreariness  of  Fulton  street  —  a  very  ccntradiction  to  that 
highway. 

Yet  Brooklyn  is  a  community  of  contradictions.  Here 
we  have  called  Fulton  street  a  possible  main  street  of 
Brooklyn,  and  yet  there  is  a  street  in  the  town,  for  the 
most  part  miles  removed  from  it,  that  is  quite  as  brisk 
by  day  and  the  only  street  in  the  borough  which  has  any 


64      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

real  activity  at  night.  Like  that  great  main-stem  of  Man 
hattan  it  is  called  Broadway,  and  it  is  a  wider  and  more 
pretentious  street  than  Fulton,  although  in  its  turn  also 
encumbered  with  an  elevated  railroad.  But  up  and  down 
Broadway  there  courses  a  constant  traffic;  on  foot,  in 
automobiles,  in  trolley-cars.  Broadway  boasts  its  own 
department-stores,  some  of  them  sizable,  many  hundreds 
of  small  shops,  cheap  theaters  —  and  some  better  —  by 
the  score.  It  is  an  entertaining  thoroughfare  and  yet 
we  will  venture  to  say  that  not  one  in  ten  thousand  of  the 
many  transients  who  come  to  New  York  at  regular  inter 
vals  and  who  know  the  Great  White  Way  as  well  as 
four  corners  up  at  home,  have  ever  stepped  foot  within 
it.  We  will  go  further.  Of  the  two  million  humans 
who  go  to  make  the  population  of  Brooklyn ;  a  large  part, 
probably  half,  certainly  a  third,  have  never  seen  its  own 
Broadway. 

This  speaks  volumes  for  the  provincialism  of  the  great 
community  across  the  East  river  from  Manhattan.  Re 
member  all  this  while  that  it  is  a  community  of  com 
munities,  self-centered  and  rather  more  intent  upon  the 
problem  of  getting  back  and  forth  between  its  homes 
and  Manhattan  than  on  any  other  one  thing  in  the  world. 
As  a  rule,  people  live  in  Brooklyn  because  it  is  less  ex 
pensive  than  residence  upon  the  island  of  Manhattan, 
more  accessible  and  far  more  comfortable  than  the 
Bronx  or  the  larger  cities  of  New  Jersey  that  range  them 
selves  close  to  the  shore  of  the  Hudson  river.  It  is  in 
reality  a  larger  and  a  better  Jersey  City  or  a  Hoboken  or 
a  Long  Island  City. 

And  yet,  like  each  of  these  three,  it  is  something  more 
than  a  mere  housing  place  for  folk  who  work  within  con 
gested  Manhattan.  It,  too,  is  a  manufacturing  center  of 
no  small  importance.  Despite  the  transportation  obsta 
cles  of  being  divided  by  one  or  two  rivers  from  most  of 
the  trunk-line  railroads  that  terminate  at  the  port  of 


A  quiet  street  on  Brooklyn  Heights 


BROOKLYN  65 

New  York,  hundreds  of  factory  chimneys,  large  and 
small,  proclaim  its  industrial  importance.  Its  output  of 
manufactures  reaches  high  into  the  millions  each  year. 
And  the  pay-roll  of  its  factory  operatives  is  annually  an 
impressive  figure. 

The  fact  remains,  however,  that  it  is  a  community  of 
communities,  each  pulling  very  largely  for  itself.  A 
smart  western  town  of  twenty-five  thousand  population 
can  center  more  energy  and  secure  for  itself  precisely 
what  it  wishes  more  rapidly  and  more  precisely  than 
can  this  great  borough  of  nearly  two  million  population. 
Brooklyn  has  not  yet  learned  the  lesson  of  concentrated 
effort. 

Now  consider  these  communities  of  old  Kings  county 
once  again.  We  have  touched  upon  their  location  and 
their  growth ;  let  us  see  the  manner  of  folk  who  made 
them  grow.  About  the  second  decade  of  the  last  cen 
tury  a  virtual  hegira  of  New  England  folk  began  to 
move  toward  New  York  City.  The  New  England  states 
were  the  first  portion  of  the  land  to  show  anything  like 
congestion,  the  wonderful  city  at  the  mouth  of  the  Hud 
son  was  beginning  to  come  into  its  own  —  opportunity 
loomed  large  in  the  eyes  of  the  shrewd  New  Englanders. 
They  began  picking  up  and  moving  toward  New  York. 
And  they  are  still  coming,  although,  of  course,  in  no 
such  volume  as  in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

These  New  England  folk  found  New  York  already 
aping  metropolitanism  —  with  its  unshaded  streets  and 
its  tightly  built  rows  of  houses.  Over  on  Long  island 
across  busy  Fulton  ferry  it  was  different.  There  must 
have  been  something  in  the  early  Brooklyn,  with  its 
gentle  shade-trees  down  the  streets  and  its  genial  air  of 
quiet  comfort  that  made  the  New  Englanders  think  of 
the  pretty  Massachusetts  and  Connecticut  towns  that  they 
had  left.  For  into  Brooklyn  they  came  —  a  steady 
stream  which  did  not  lessen  in  volume  until  the  days 


66      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

of  the  Civil  War.  They  gave  the  place  a  blood  infusion 
that  it  needed.  They  crowded  the  old  Dutch  families 
to  one  side  and  laid  the  social  foundations  of  the  Brook 
lyn  of  today. 

It  was  New  England  who  founded  the  excellent  pri 
vate  schools  and  small  colleges  of  Brooklyn,  who  early 
gave  to  her  a  public-school  system  of  wide  reputation. 
It  was  New  England  who  sprinkled  the  Congregational 
churches  over  the  older  Brooklyn,  who  gave  to  their  pul 
pits  a  Talmage  and  a  Storrs,  who  brought  Henry  Ward 
Beecher  out  from  the  wilds  of  the  Mid- west  and  made 
him  the  most  famous  preacher  that  America  has  ever 
known.  It  was  New  England  who  for  forty  years  made 
Brooklyn  Heights  —  with  its  exquisite  situation  on  a 
plateau  overlooking  the  upper  harbor  of  New  York  — 
the  finest  residential  locality  in  the  land.  It  was  New 
England  for  almost  all  that  time  who  filled  the  great 
churches  of  the  Heights  to  their  capacity  Sabbath  morn 
ing  after  Sabbath  morning  —  New  England  who  stood 
for  high  thought,  decent  living  and  real  progress  in 
Brooklyn.  It  was  New  England  that  made  Brooklyn 
eat  her  pork  and  beans  religiously  each  Sabbath  eve. 

The  great  churches  and  the  fine  houses  still  stand  on 
Brooklyn  Heights,  but  alas,  there  are  few  struggles  at 
the  church-doors  any  more  on  Sabbath  morning.  The 
old  houses,  the  fine,  gentle  old  houses  —  many  of  them  — 
have  said  good-by  to  their  masters,  their  gayeties  and 
their  glories.  Some  of  them  have  been  pulled  down  to 
make  room  for  gingerbread  apartment  structures  and 
some  of  those  that  have  remained  have  suffered  degra 
dation  as  lodging-  and  as  boarding-houses.  It  has  been 
hard  to  hold  the  younger  generation  of  fashionable 
Brooklyn  in  Brooklyn.  Manhattan  is  too  near,  too  al 
luring  with  all  of  its  cosmopolitan  airs,  and  these  days 
there  is  another  steady  hegira  across  the  East  river — • 


BROOKLYN  67 

the  first  families  of  Brooklyn  seeking  residence  among 
the  smart  streets  of  upper  Manhattan. 

There  is  another  reason  for  this.  We  have  told  how 
Brooklyn  sold  her  birthright  when  she  threw  off  her  po 
litical  individuality  and  made  herself  a  borough  of  an 
enlarged  New  York.  Perhaps  it  would  be  more  true 
to  say  that  she  mortgaged  that  birthright  the  very  hour 
when  the  Brooklyn  bridge,  then  new,  took  up  the  full 
ness  of  its  mighty  work.  In  the  weaving  of  that  bridge 
is  wrapped  one  of  the  little-known  tragedies  of  Brooklyn 
—  the  immensely  human  story  of  Roebling,  its  designer 
and  its  builder,  who  suffered  fatal  injuries  upon  it  and 
who  died  a  lingering  death  before  it  was  completed. 
Roebling's  apartments  were  upon  a  high  crest  of  Brook 
lyn  Heights  and  the  windows  of  his  sick-room  looked 
down  upon  the  workmen  who  were  weaving  the  steel 
web  of  the  bridge.  In  the  last  hours  of  his  life  he  could 
see  the  creation  of  his  mind,  the  structure  that  was  about 
to  be  known  as  one  of  the  eight  modern  wonders  of  the 
world,  being  made  ready  for  its  task  of  the  long  years. 

The  coming  of  that  first  bridge  began  the  transforma 
tion  of  Brooklyn ;  although  for  a  long  time  Brooklyn 
did  not  realize  it.  The  New  England  element  within 
her  population  did  not  even  realize  it  when  she  gave 
up  her  political  identity  as  a  city.  Then  something  else 
happened.  Two  miles  to  the  north  of  the  first  bridge 
another  was  built  —  this  with  its  one  arm  touching  the 
East  Side  of  Manhattan  —  the  most  crowded  residence 
district  in  the  new  world  —  while  its  other  hand  reached 
that  portion  of  Brooklyn,  formerly  known  as  Williams- 
burgh.  We  have  already  spoken  of  Williamsburgh  — 
in  its  day  a  city  of  some  promise  but  for  sixty  years  now 
part  of  Brooklyn.  In  the  greater  part  of  these  sixty 
years  it  hung  tenaciously  to  its  personality.  Back  of  it 
was  a  great  area  of  regular  streets  and  small  houses 


68      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

known  as  the  Eastern  District.  The  folk  who  lived 
there  called  themselves  Brooklyn  folk.  Williamsburgh 
was  different.  Its  folk  were  glad  to  give  themselves 
the  name  of  the  old  town,  although  the  pattern  of  its 
streets  ran  closely  into  the  pattern  of  the  streets  of  the 
community  which  had  engulfed  it.  They  held  them 
selves  a  bit  by  themselves.  They  had  their  own  shops, 
their  own  theater,  their  own  clubs,  their  own  churches, 
their  own  schools.  They  also  had  the  opportunity  of 
seeing  the  social  and  the  business  changes  that  the  de 
velopment  of  the  first  bridge  had  wrought  in  old  Brook 
lyn;  how  Fulton  street  from  the  old  City  Hall  down  to 
the  ferry-house  had  lost  its  gayety  and  was  entering  upon 
decadence. 

The  Williamsburgh  bridge  repeated  the  story  of  the 
Brooklyn  bridge  —  only  in  sharper  measure.  It  was 
like  a  tube  lancing  the  overcrowded  mass  of  the  East 
Side  of  Manhattan.  It  had  hardly  been  completed  be 
fore  it  had  its  own  hegira.  The  Jews  of  the  crowded 
tenements  of  Rivington  and  Allen  and  Essex  and  all  the 
other  congested  narrow  streets  east  of  the  Bowery  be 
gan  moving  over  the  new  bridge  and  out  to  a  distant 
section  of  Brooklyn,  known  as  Brownsville.  They  had 
preempted  Brownsville  for  their  own.  For  a  time  that 
was  all  right.  Then  the  wiser  men  of  that  wise  old  race 
began  asking  themselves  "  why  go  to  Brownsville,  eight 
or  nine  miles  distant,  when  at  the  other  end  of  the  bridge 
is  a  fair  land  for  settlement  ?  " 

So  began  changed  conditions  for  Williamsburgh.  For 
a  little  while  it  sought  to  oppose  the  change,  but  an  ox 
might  as  well  pull  against  the  mighty  power  of  a  loco 
motive,  as  a  community  try  to  defy  the  working  of 
economic  law.  For  a  decade  now  Williamsburgh  has 
been  "  moving  out,"  her  houses,  her  churches,  many  of 
her  pet  institutions  —  going  the  most  part  farther  out 
upon  Long  island  and  there  rebuilding  under  many  pro- 


BROOKLYN  69 

tective  restrictions.  The  old  Williamsburgh  is  nearly 
gone.  Strange  tongues  and  strange  creeds  are  heard 
within  her  churches.  And  some  of  them  have  been 
pulled  down,  along  with  whole  blocks  of  the  gentle  red 
brick  houses,  to  give  way  to  cheap  apartments,  wrought 
wondrously  and  fearfully  and  echoing  with  the  bab 
bling  of  unfamiliar  words.  Nor  has  the  transformation 
stopped  at  Williamsburgh.  The  invasion  has  crept,  is 
still  creeping  into  the  Eastern  District  just  beyond,  trans 
forming  quiet  house-lined  streets  into  noisy  ways  lined 
with  crowded  apartments. 

It  is  only  within  a  comparatively  little  time  that  the 
older  Brooklyn  has  realized  the  change  that  is  coming 
upon  her.  She  has  known  for  years  of  the  presence  of 
many  thousands  of  Irish  and  German  within  her  boun 
daries.  They  have  been  useful  citizens  in  her  develop 
ment  and  have  done  much  for  her  in  both  a  generous 
and  an  intelligent  fashion.  She  holds  today  great  col 
onies  of  Norse  and  of  the  Swedish  —  down  close  to  the 
waterfront  in  the  neighborhood  of  the  Narrows,  and 
her  Italian  citizens,  taken  by  themselves,  would  make 
the  greatest  Italian  city  in  the  world.  She  has  the  larg 
est  single  colony  of  Syrians  in  the  New  World  and  more 
than  half  a  million  Jews.  According  to  reliable  esti 
mates,  three-quarters  of  her  adult  population  today  are 
foreign-born. 

Thus  can  we  record  the  transformation  of  a  com 
munity.  It  is  a  transformation  which  has  created  many 
problems,  far  too  many  to  be  recounted  here.  We  have 
only  room  to  show  the  nature  of  the  change  to  a  town 
where  grandfathers  used  to  be  all  in  all  and  which  has 
sleepily  awakened  to  find  itself  cosmopolitan,  its  institu 
tions  changing,  its  future  uncertain.  There  have  not 
been  a  dozen  important  Protestant  churches  builded  in 
Brooklyn  within  the  past  twelve  years  —  and  some  of 
these  merely  new  edifices  for  old  congregations  which 


70      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

have  been  forced  to  pick  up  and  move.  And  there  have 
been  old  churches  of  old  faiths  that  finally  have  had  to 
give  up  and  close  their  doors  for  the  final  time.  Even 
the  old  custom  of  singing  Christmas  songs  in  the  public 
schools  has  been  forbidden.  The  New  England  strain 
of  Americanism  in  Brooklyn  is  dying. 

Brooklyn  today  has  no  theater  of  wide  reputation, 
although  in  Greenwood  she  has  what  is  deservedly  the 
most  famous  cemetery  in  America.  Hold  on,  Brooklyn 
may  have  no  theater,  but  she  has  a  town-hall  and  a  town- 
hall  that  is  worthy  of  mention  here.  They  do  not  call 
it  the  town-hall  or  the  opera-house,  but  it  is  known  as  the 
Academy  of  Music  and  it  is  an  institution  well  worth 
the  while  of  any  town.  And  the  Brooklyn  Academy  of 
Music  is  the  rallying  or  focal  point  for  so  much  that 
stands  for  good  within  the  community  that  we  must  see 
how  it  has  come  into  being. 

It  seems  that  when  Brooklyn  men  and  women  of  to 
day  were  Brooklyn  boys  and  girls  there  stood  down  on 
Montague  street  in  the  oldest  part  of  the  town  an  elder 
Academy  of  Music  and  to  it  they  were  taken  on  certain 
great  occasions  to  hear  a  splendid  lecture  with  magic- 
lantern  pictures,  the  Swiss  Bell  Ringers,  or  perhaps  even 
real  drama  or  real  opera,  although  play-acting  was 
frowned  upon  in  the  early  days  of  that  barn-like  struc 
ture.  Eventually,  its  directors  capitulated  entirely. 
Times  were  changing.  So  it  was  that  Brooklyn  saw  the 
great  actors  and  the  great  singers  of  yesterday  upon  the 
stage  of  its  old  Academy;  from  that  stage  it  heard  its 
own  preachers,  heard  such  orators  as  Edward  Everett 
and  John  B.  Gough;  crowded  into  the  spacious  auditor 
ium  at  the  Commencement  exercises  and  the  amateur 
dramatics  of  its  boys  and  girls.  The  old  Academy  was 
a  part  of  the  social  fabric  of  old  Brooklyn. 

There  comes  an  end  to  all  temporal  things  and  a  win- 


BROOKLYN  71 

ter's  morning  a  full  decade  ago  saw  the  historic  opera 
house  go  up  in  a  truly  theatrical  puff  of  smoke  and 
flame.  And  it  was  said  that  day  that  Brooklyn  had  lost 
an  institution  by  which  it  was  as  well  known  as  the 
Navy  Yard  or  Plymouth  church  —  where  Beecher  had 
once  thundered.  Before  the  ruins  in  Montague  street 
were  cool  there  were  demands  that  the  Academy  be  re 
built.  Brooklynites  even  then  were  beginning  to  feel 
that  the  old  Brooklyn  was  beginning  to  pass.  Beecher 
was  dead ;  the  last  of  Talmage's  Tabernacles  was  burned 
and  was  not  to  be  rebuilt.  The  idea  of  becoming  a 
second  Harlem  was  appalling.  The  rebuilding  of  the 
Academy  was  a  popular  measure,  a  test  as  to  Brooklyn's 
ability  to  preserve  at  least  a  vestige  of  civic  unity  unto 
herself. 

It  was  a  hard  test  and  it  almost  failed.  There  was 
a  time  wrhen  it  seemed  as  if  Brooklyn  must  give  up  and 
become  the  Cinderella  of  all  the  boroughs  of  the  new 
New  York.  But  it  seems  that  there  were  other  institu 
tions  in  Brooklyn  and  not  the  least  of  these  was,  and 
still  is,  the  Institute  of  Arts  and  Sciences.  This  is  a 
sort  of  civic  Chautauqua.  Toward  it  several  thousand 
men  and  women  each  pay  five  dollars  a  year  for  the  op 
portunity  to  gain  culture  and  entertainment  at  the  same 
time.  They  have  lectures,  museums,  picture-shows,  reci 
tals  and  the  like  and  this  institute  has  so  fat  a  purse  that 
the  impresario  or  prima  donna  is  yet  to  be  found  who 
is  strong  enough  to  withstand  its  pleadings. 

This  institute  came  valiantly  to  the  aid  of  the  Acad 
emy  project  and  saved  the  day.  While  it  has  no  pro 
prietary  interest  in  the  new  structure,  it  is  its  chief  ten 
ant,  and  the  new  Academy  was  planned  in  detail  to  meet 
the  needs  of  this  popular  educational  institution.  So, 
while  the  old  Academy  had  a  single  auditorium,  the  new 
has  a  half-dozen  big  and  comfortable  meeting-places. 
On  a  single  night  Brooklyn  can  snap  its  fingers  at  the 


72      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Metropolitan  Opera  House,  over  across  the  East  river, 
and  can  gather  within  its  own  Temple  of  Song  —  a 
spacious  and  elegant  theater  which  receives  the  Metro 
politan  company  once  a  week  during  the  season  —  can 
place  another  great  audience  in  the  adjoining  Music 
Hall,  with  its  well-renowned  pipe-organ;  in  still  another 
hall  hear  some  traveler  show  his  pretty  pictures  and  tell 
of  distant  climes  and  strange  peoples;  in  a  lofty  ball 
room,  hold  formal  reception  and  dance;  and  gather  in 
a  still  smaller  hall  to  hear  Professor  Something-or-other 
discuss  the  geological  strata  of  Iceland  or  the  like.  In 
this  way,  several  audiences,  all  bent  on  divers  purposes, 
can  be  assembled  in  this  big  and  passing  handsome  struc 
ture  and  yet  be  completely  independent  of  each  other. 
The  new  Brooklyn  Academy,  wrought  after  a  hard  fight, 
is  no  tiny  toy. 

The  building  was  largely  a  labor  of  love  to  those  who 
succeeded  in  getting  the  subscriptions  for  it.  Its  main 
tenance  is  today  almost  a  labor  of  love  for  its  stock 
holders  are  not  alone  the  wealthy  bankers  and  the  mer 
chants  of  the  town.  Its  stock-list  is  as  catholic  as  its 
endeavors  —  and  they  are  legion.  It  is  designed  to  be 
eventually  a  gathering-place  for  the  butcher,  the  baker, 
the  candle-stick  maker;  all  the  sturdy  folk  who  have 
their  homes  from  Greenpoint  to  Coney  island. 

"  One  thing  more,"  you  demand.  "  How  about  Coney 
island?" 

Coney  island  is  a  part  of  Brooklyn.  It  is  also  the 
most  advertised  and  the  most  over-rated  show  place  in 
the  whole  land.  While  the  older  Brooklyn  used  to  drive 
down  to  that  sand-spit  facing  the  sea  for  clams  and  for 
fish-dinner  in  the  summer  days,  it  is  only  within  the  past 
few  years  that  it  has  been  commercialized  and  an  at 
tempt  made  to  place  it  upon  a  business  basis.  We  are 
inclined  to  think  that  the  attempt,  measured  in  the  long 


BROOKLYN  73 

run,  has  been  a  failure.  It  began  about  ten  years  ago, 
when  the  standard  of  entertainment  at  the  famous  beach 
had  fallen  low.  A  young  man,  with  a  gift  for  the  show 
business,  created  a  great  amusement  park  there  by  the 
side  of  the  sea. 

"  People  do  not  come  to  Coney  island  to  see  the 
ocean,"  he  said.  "  They  come  down  here  for  a  good 
time." 

It  looked  as  if  he  was  right.  His  amusement  park 
was  a  great  novelty  and  for  a  time  a  tremendous  suc 
cess.  It  had  splendid  imitators  almost  within  a  stone- 
throw  —  its  name  and  its  purpose  were  being  copied 
all  the  way  across  the  land.  Perhaps  people  did  not 
go  to  Coney  island,  after  all,  to  see  the  cool  and  lovely 
ocean. 

But  after  a  time  the  fickle  taste  of  metropolitan  New 
York  seemed  to  change.  New  Yorkers  did  not  seem  to 
care  quite  as  much  for  the  gay  creations  of  paint  and 
tinsel,  the  eerie  cities  that  were  born  anew  each  night 
in  the  glories  of  electric  lighting.  Fire  came  to  Coney 
island  —  again  and  again.  It  scoured  the  paint  and  tin 
sel  cities,  thrust  the  highest  of  their  towers,  a  blackened 
ruin,  to  the  ground.  Pious  folk  said  that  God  was 
scourging  Coney  island  for  its  contempt  for  His  laws. 
And  the  fact  remains  that  it  has  not  regained  the  pre 
eminence  of  its  position  ten  years  ago. 

We  think  that  a  man  who  had  been  out  of  Brooklyn 
for  twenty  years  and  whose  recollections  of  the  won 
derful  beach  that  forms  her  southern  outpost  were  recol 
lections  of  great  gardens ;  of  Patrick  Gilmore  playing 
inimitable  marches  in  front  of  one  giant  hotel  and  of 
the  incomparable  Siedl  leading  his  orchestra  beside  an 
other,  would  do  better  than  to  return  to  Coney  island. 
Siedl  is  dead;  so  is  Gilmore  and  even  the  huge  wooden 
hotel  that  looked  down  upon  him  was  pulled  apart  last 
year  to  make  room  for  the  encroaching  streets  and  houses 


74      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

of  a  growing  Brooklyn.  The  paint  and  the  tinsel  of 
Coney  island  grows  tarnished  —  and  that  twenty-year 
exile  could  find  little  else  than  the  sea  to  hold  his  inter 
est.  And  the  folk  who  go  to  Coney  island  today  seem 
to  care  very  little  for  the  sea  —  save  perhaps  as  a  giant 
bath-tub. 

We  think  that  the  absentee  of  twenty  years'  standing 
would  do  far  better  to  go  to  Prospect  Park.  That  really 
superb  pleasure-ground,  planned  through  the  foresight 
of  a  Brooklyn  man  of  half  a  century  ago,  remains  prac 
tically  unchanged  through  the  years.  It  remains  one  of 
the  great  parks,  not  only  of  America,  but  of  the  entire 
world.  It  is  the  real  lion  of  Brooklyn.  It  is  incom 
parably  finer  than  its  rival,  the  somewhat  neglected  Cen 
tral  Park  of  Manhattan.  And  alas,  Manhattan  seems 
to  think  so,  too,  for  to  Prospect  Park  it  sends  each  bright 
summer  Sunday  not  the  best  but  the  roughest  of  its 
hordes.  And  Brooklyn  sighs  when  it  sees  its  lovely 
playground  stolen  from  it. 

It  is  more  than  playground  —  Prospect  Park.  It  is 
history.  There  are  no  historic  buildings  in  Brooklyn  — 
unless  we  except  the  Dutch  Reformed  church  out  in  Flat- 
bush —  but  all  of  Prospect  Park  was  once  a  battlefield 
—  the  theater  of  that  bitter  and  bloody  conflict  of  July, 
1776,  when  Washington  was  routed  by  British  strategy 
and  forced  to  retire  from  the  city  that  he  needed  most 
of  all  to  hold.  Through  its  great  meadows  Continental 
and  Briton  and  Hessian  once  marched  with  murder  in 
their  hearts.  In  those  great  meadows  today  the  boys 
and  girls  of  the  Brooklyn  of  today  play  tennis ;  the  older 
men,  after  the  fashion  of  the  Brooklyn  of  other  days, 
their  croquet.  And  annually  down  the  greensward  the 
little  children  of  Brooklyn  march  in  brilliant  June-time 
pageant. 

The  Sunday-school  parade  of  Brooklyn  is  one  of  the 
plder  institutions  of  the  town  that  still  survives.  An- 


BROOKLYN  75 

nually  and  upon  the  first  Thursday  afternoon  of  June 
the  children  of  all  the  Sabbath-schools  of  the  borough 
march  out  upon  its  streets.  There  is  not  room  even  in 
Prospect  Park  for  all  of  these  —  for  sometimes  there  are 
150,000  of  them  marching  of  an  afternoon;  and  the 
great  distances  within  Brooklyn  must  also  be  brought 
into  consideration.  But  the  largest  of  the  individual 
parades  always  marches  in  the  park  —  marches  like 
trained  troopers  up  past  the  dignitaries  in  the  reviewing 
stand,  and  the  mayor,  and  the  other  city  officers,  the  Gov 
ernor  of  the  State,  not  infrequently  the  President  of  the 
United  States.  There  is  much  music,  great  excitement 
—  and  ice-cream  afterwards.  Sharp  denominational 
bars  are  let  down  and  the  ice-cream  goes  to  all.  And 
the  boys  and  girls  who  are  to  be  the  men  and  women  of 
the  Brooklyn  of  tomorrow  and  who  are  to  face  its  great 
problems  march  proudly  by,  knowing  that  the  loving  eye 
of  father  or  of  mother  must  be  upon  them. 

The  problems  of  the  Brooklyn  of  tomorrow  are  not 
to  be  carelessly  dismissed.  Nor  is  the  problem  of  Brook 
lyn's  future  in  any  way  hopeless.  The  changing  of 
conditions,  the  changing  of  habits,  the  changing  of  insti 
tutions  does  not  of  necessity  spell  utter  ruin.  Cosmo 
politanism  does  not  mean  the  end  of  all  things.  We 
have  called  her  dull  and  emotionless  and  provincial,  and 
yet  many  of  her  residents  are  quick  and  appreciative  — 
well-traveled  and  well-read  —  anxious  to  meet  the  new 
conditions,  to  solve  the  problems  that  have  been  en 
tailed.  And  we  have  not  the  slightest  doubt  that  in  the 
long  run  they  will  be  solved,  that  Brooklyn  will  be  ready 
and  willing  to  undertake  the  great  problem  that  has  been 
thrust  upon  her  —  the  fusing  of  her  hundreds  of  thou 
sands  of  foreign-born  into  first-rate  Americans. 


4 

WILLIAM  PENN'S  TOWN 

TO  approach  Philadelphia  in  a  humble  spirit  of  abso 
lute  appreciation,  you  must  come  to  her  by  one  of 
the  historic  pikes  that  spread  from  her  like  cart-wheel 
spokes  from  their  hub.  You  will  find  one  of  those  old 
roads  easily  enough,  for  they  radiate  from  her  in  every 
direction.  And  when  you  have  found  your  pike  you 
will  discover  that  it  is  a  fine  road,  even  in  these  days 
when  there  is  a  "  good-roads  movement "  abroad  in  the 
land.  You  can  traverse  it  into  town  as  best  suits  your 
fancy  —  and  your  purse.  If  you  are  fortunate  enough 
to  own  an  automobile  you  will  find  motoring  one  of  the 
greatest  of  many  joys  in  the  southeastern  corner  of 
Pennsylvania.  If  your  purse  is  thin  you  can  have  joyous 
health  out  of  walking  the  long  miles  such  as  is  denied 
to  your  proud  motorist.  And  if  you  have  neither  money 
nor  robust  health  for  hard  walking,  you  will  find  a  trol 
ley  line  along  each  of  the  important  pikes.  Philadel 
phia  does  not  close  her  most  gracious  avenues  of  ap 
proach  to  you  — -  no  matter  who  you  are  or  what  you  are. 

Here  we  are  at  the  William  Penn  Inn  at  dawn  of  a 
September  morning  waiting  to  tramp  our  way,  at  least 
to  the  outskirts  of  the  closely  built  part  of  the  city.  And 
before  we  are  away  from  the  tavern  which  has  kept 
us  through  the  lonely  chill  of  the  night,  give  it  a  single 
parting  glance.  It  has  been  standing  there  at  the  cross 
roads  of  two  of  the  busy  pikes  of  Montgomery  county 
for  a  full  century  and  a  half.  In  all  those  years  it  has 

76 


PHILADELPHIA  77 

not  closed  its  door  against  man  or  beast,  seeking  shelter 
or  refreshment.  There  is  a  record  of  one  hundred  and 
fifty  years  of  hospitality  for  which  it  does  not  have  to 
make  apologies. 

Sometimes  you  will  discover  small  inns  of  this  sort 
along  the  roadsides  of  New  England,  but  we  do  not 
know  where  else  you  will  find  them  without  crossing  the 
Atlantic  and  seeking  them  out  in  the  Surrey  and  the 
Sussex  of  the  older  England.  Yet  around  Philadephia 
they  are  plentiful  —  with  their  yellow  plastered  walls, 
tight  green  shutters  hung  against  them,  their  low-ceil- 
inged  rooms,  their  broad  fire-places,  their  stout  stone 
out-buildings,  and  their  shady  piazzas,  giving  to  the  high 
way.  Some  of  them  have  quite  wonderful  signs  and 
all  of  them  have  a  wonderful  hospitality  —  heritage  from 
the  Quaker  manner  of  living. 

So  from  the  William  Penn  Inn  one  may  start  after 
breakfast  as  one  might  have  started  a  century  ago  — 
to  walk  his  way  into  the  busy  town.  The  four  corners 
where  the  pikes  cross  stand  upon  a  high  ridge  —  a  smooth 
white  house  of  stone,  a  meeting-house  of  the  Friends, 
and  the  tavern  occupying  three  of  them.  The  fourth 
gives  to  a  view  of  distant  fields  —  and  such  a  view! 
Montgomery  is  a  county  of  fat  farms.  You  can  see  the 
rich  lands  down  in  the  valleys,  the  shrewder  genius  re 
quired  to  make  the  more  sterile  ridge  acres  yield.  And, 
as  you  trudge  down  the  pike,  the  view  stays  with  you  for 
a  long  while. 

At  the  bottom  of  the  hill  a  little  stream  and  the  inevit 
able  toll-gate  that  seem  to  hedge  in  Philadelphia  from 
every  side.  But  your  payment  to  the  toll-keeper  upon 
the  Bethlehem  pike  this  morning  is  voluntary.  His  smile 
is  genial,  his  gate  open.  A  cigar  is  to  his  liking  and  if 
you  would  tarry  for  a  little  time  within  the  living-room 
of  the  toll-house  he  would  tell  you  stories  of  the  pike  — 
stories  that  would  make  it  worth  the  waiting.  But  — 


78      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Philadelphia  is  miles  away,  the  road  to  it  long  and  dusty 
You  pick  up  your  way  and  off  you  go. 

Little  towns  and  big.  Sleepy  towns  most  of  them; 
but  occasionally  one  into  which  the  railroad  has  thrust 
itself  and  Industry  flaunts  a  smoky  chimney  up  to  the 
blue  sky.  Quaker  meeting-houses  a  plenty,  with  the  tiny 
grave-stones  hardly  showing  themselves  through  the  long 
grass  roundabout  them.  But  those  same  neat  stones 
show  that  the  Friends  are  a  long-lived  folk,  and  if  you 
lift  yourself  up  to  peer  through  the  windows  of  one  of 
these  meeting-houses  you  may  see  the  exquisite  simplicity 
of  its  arrangement.  The  meeting-house  is  modern  —  it 
only  dates  back  to  1823  —  and  yet  it  is  typical.  Two 
masses  of  benches  on  a  slightly  inclined  floor,  the  one  side 
for  the  men,  the  other  for  the  women.  Facing  them  two 
rows  of  benches,  for  the  elders.  No  altar,  not  even  a 
pulpit  or  reading-desk;  there  is  an  utter  absence  of  dec 
oration.  You  do  not  wonder  that  the  young  folk  in  this 
mad,  gay  day  fail  to  incline  to  the  old  faith  of  "  thee  " 
and  "  thou,"  and  that  no  more  than  forty  or  fifty  folk, 
almost  all  of  them  close  to  the  evenings  of  their  life 
gather  here  on  the  morning  of  First  Day. 

Between  the  villages  and  the  meeting-houses  the  solid, 
substantial  farmhouses.  And  what  farmhouses  !  Farm 
houses,  immaculate  as  to  whitewash  and  to  lawn,  with 
cool  porches,  shaded  by  brightly  striped  awnings  and 
holding  Windsor  chairs  and  big  swinging  Gloucester  ham 
mocks.  This  is  farming.  And  the  prosperous  look  of 
the  staunch  barns  belies  even  thought  that  this  is  dilet 
tante  agriculture.  It  is  merely  evidence  that  farmers 
along  the  great  pikes  of  Montgomery  and  Bucks  and 
Berks  have  not  lost  their  old-time  cunning.  And  if  the 
farmer  no  longer  drives  his  great  Conestoga  wagons  into 
market  at  Philadelphia,  it  is  because  he  prefers  to  run 
in  with  his  own  motor  car  and  let  other  and  more  mod- 


PHILADELPHIA  79 

ern  transportation  methods  bring  his  products  to  the 
consumer. 

Lunch  at  another  roadside  tavern.  Bless  your  heart, 
this  one,  like  the  meeting-house  of  the  Friends  back  the 
pike  a  way,  is  cursed  with  modernity.  It  can  only  claim 
sixty  years  of  hospitable  existence.  Mine  host  can  tell 
no  fascinating  yarn  of  General  Washington  having  slept 
beneath  his  roof,  even  though  his  tavern  is  named  after 
no  less  a  personage.  Instead  he  relates  mournfully  how 
a  tavern  over  on  the  Bristol  pike  has  a  tablet  in  its  tap 
room  telling  of  the  memorable  night  that  the  members 
of  the  Continental  Congress  moving  from  New  York  to 
Philadelphia  tarried  under  that  roof.  Two  good  anec 
dotes  and  a  corking  name  almost  make  a  wayside  inn. 
But  the  anecdotes  are  not  always  easy  to  find. 

After  lunch  and  a  good  rest  the  last  stages  of  the 
journey.  The  little  towns  grow  more  closely  together; 
there  are  more  houses,  more  intersecting  cross-roads.  It 
will  be  worth  your  while  not  to  miss  the  signs  upon  these. 
The  very  names  on  the  sign-posts  —  Plymouth  Meeting, 
Wheel  Pump,  Spring  House,  Bird-in-hand  —  seem  to  pro 
claim  that  this  is  a  venerable  country  indeed.  More 
closely  do  the  houses  grow  together,  the  farms  disap 
pear,  an  ancient  mile-post  thrusts  itself  into  your  vision. 
It  is  stone,  but,  after  the  fashion  of  these  Pennsylvania 
Dutch,  white-washed  and  readable.  It  tells  you: 


C.H. 
i  M. 

But  Philadelphia  in  reality  is  no  ten  miles  away.  For 
here  is  Chestnut  Hill,  the  houses  numbered,  city-fashion 
and  the  yellow  trolley  cars  multiplied  within  the  busy 
highway  which  has  become  a  city  street  without  you 
having  realized  the  transition.  The  smart  looking  po- 


8o      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

liceman  at  the  corner  will  tell  you  that  Chestnut  Hill 
is  today  one  of  the  wards  of  Philadelphia. 

The  city  at  last !  You  may  turn  at  the  top  of  a  long 
hill  and  for  a  final  instant  confront  the  country  beyond, 
rolling,  fertile,  prosperous,  the  gentle  wooded  hills  giv 
ing  soft  undulation  to  the  horizon.  Then  look  forward 
and  face  the  busy  town.  For  a  long  time  yet  your  way 
shall  be  down  what  seems  to  be  the  main  street  of  a 
prosperous  village,  with  its  great  homes  set  away  back 
in  green  lawns  from  the  noisy  pavement  and  the  public 
sidewalk.  There  are  shops  but  they  are  distinctly  local 
shops  and  the  churches  bear  the  names  of  the  brisk  towns 
that  were  submerged  in  the  making  of  a  larger  Phila 
delphia  —  Chestnut  Hill,  Mount  Airy,  Germantown. 

And  down  this  same  busy  street  history  has  marched 
before  you.  Some  of  it  has  been  recorded  here  and 
there  in  bronze  tablets  along  the  street.  In  front  of  one 
old  house,  one  learns  that  General  Washington  conferred 
with  his  officers  at  the  eve  of  the  battle  of  Germantown 
and  on  the  door-steps  of  another  —  set  even  today  in  its 
own  deep  grounds  —  Redcoat  and  Buff  struggled  in  a 
memorable  conflict.  For  this  was  the  mansion  of  Judge 
Chew,  transformed  in  an  instant  of  an  autumn  day  from 
country-house  to  fortress.  It  was  from  the  windows 
of  this  old  house  that  six  companies  of  Colonel  Mus- 
grave's  Fortieth  regiment  poured  down  a  deadly  fire 
upon  Mad  Anthony  Wayne  and  his  men  even  as  they  at 
tempted  to  set  fire  to  it.  The  house  stood  and  so  stood 
the  Fortieth  regiment.  General  Washington  lost  his 
chance  to  enter  Philadelphia  that  autumn,  and  Valley 
Forge  was  so  writ  into  the  pages  of  history. 

History!  It  is  spread  up  and  down  this  main  street 
of  Germantown,  it  slips  down  the  side-streets  and  up  the 
alleys,  into  the  hospitable  front-doors  of  stout  stone- 
houses.  Here  it  shows  its  teeth  in  the  bullet-holes  of  the 
aged  wooden  fence  back  of  the  Johnson  house  and  here 


PHILADELPHIA  81 

is  the  Logan  house,  the  Morris  house,  the  Wend  house, 
the  Concord  school  and  the  burying-ground.  Any  resi 
dent  of  Germantown  will  tell  you  what  these  old  houses 
mean  to  it,  the  part  they  have  played  in  its  making. 

After  Germantown  —  Philadelphia  itself.  The  road 
dips  down  a  sudden  hill,  loses  itself  in  a  short  tunnel 
under  a  black  maze  of  railroad  tracks.  Beyond  the  rail 
road  track  the  city  is  solidly  built,  row  upon  row  of  nar 
row  streets  lined  with  small  flat-roofed  brick  houses,  the 
monotony  only  accentuated  by  an  occasional  church-spire 
or  towering  factory.  In  the  distance  a  group  of  higher 
buildings  —  downtown  Philadelphia  —  rising  above  the 
tallest  of  them  Father  Penn  poised  on  the  great  tower 
of  the  City  Hall.  No  need  now  for  more  tramping. 
The  fascination  of  the  open  country  is  gone  and  a  trol 
ley  car  will  take  you  through  tedious  city  blocks  —  in 
Philadelphia  they  call  them  squares  —  almost  to  the  door 
of  that  City  Hall.  They  are  tedious  blocks.  Architec 
turally  Philadelphia  is  the  most  monotonous  city  in 
America  with  its  little  red-brick  houses.  Dr.  S.  Weir 
Mitchell  who  has  known  it  through  all  the  years  of  his 
life  has  called  it  the  "  Red  City  "  and  rightly,  too. 

For  mile  after  mile  of  the  older  Philadelphia  is  mile 
after  mile  of  those  flat-roofed  red-brick  houses.  They 
seemingly  must  have  been  made  at  some  mill,  in  great 
quantities  and  from  a  limited  variety  of  patterns.  For 
they  are  almost  all  alike,  with  their  two  or  three  stories 
of  narrow  windows  and  doors ;  steps  and  lintels  and  cor 
nice  of  white  marble  and  invariably  set  close  upon  the 
sidewalk  line.  There  is  no  more  generosity  than  indi 
viduality  about  the  typical  side  streets  of  Philadelphia. 

A  single  thing  will  catch  your  eye  about  these  Phila 
delphia  houses  —  a  small  metal  device  which  is  usually 
placed  upon  the  ledge  of  a  second-story  window.  The 
window  must  be  my  lady's  sitting-room,  for  a  closer 
look  shows  the  device  to  be  a  mirror,  rather  two  or 


82      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

three  mirrors,  so  cunningly  placed  that  they  will  show 
her  folk  passing  up  and  down  or  standing  upon  her  door 
step  without  troubling  her  to  leave  her  comfortable  rock 
ing  chair.  There  must  be  a  hundred  thousand  of  these 
devices  in  Philadelphia.  They  call  them  "  busy-bodies  " 
quite  appropriately,  and  they  are  as  typical  of  the  town 
as  its  breakfast  scrapple  and  sausage. 

Even  a  slow-moving  Philadelphia  trolley  car  even 
tually  accomplishes  its  purpose  and  you  will  find  your 
self  slipping  from  the  older  town  into  the  oldest.  The 
trolley  car  grinds  around  an  open  square  —  Franklin 
square,  the  conductor  informs  you  and  then  tells  you 
that  despite  its  name  it  is  not  to  be  confounded  with 
that  aristocrat,  Rittenhouse  square,  nor  even  with  the 
more  democratic  Logan  square.  You  see  that  for  your 
self.  There  are  mean  streets  aroundabout  this  square. 
Oldest  Philadelphia  assuredly  is  not  putting  her  best 
foot  forward. 

And  yet  these  sordid  streets  are  not  without  their 
fascination.  The  ugly  monotony  of  flat-roofs  is  gone. 
These  roofs  are  high-pitched  and  bristle  with  small- 
paned  dormer  windows  and  with  chimneys,  for  the 
houses  that  stand  beneath  them  are  very,  very  old  indeed. 
And  they  are  typical  of  that  Georgian  architecture  that 
we  love  to  call  Colonial.  A  brave  show  these  houses 
once  must  have  made  —  even  today  a  bit  of  battered 
rail,  a  fragment  of  door  or  window-casing  or  fanlight 
proclaims  that  once  they  were  quality.  Fallen  to  a  law 
estate,  to  the  housing  of  Italians  or  Chinese  instead  of 
quiet  Quakers,  they  seem  almost  to  be  content  that  their 
streets  have  fallen  with  them;  that  few  seem  to  seek 
them  out  in  this  decidedly  unfashionable  corner  of 
Philadelphia. 

"  Arch  street,"  calls  the  conductor  and  it  is  time  to 
get  out  It  is  time  to  thread  your  way  down  one  of  the 


PHILADELPHIA  83 

earliest  streets  of  the  old  Red  City,  time  to  pay  your  re 
spects  at  the  tomb  of  him  who  ranked  with  Perm,  the 
Proprietor,  as  the  greatest  citizen.  You  can  find  this 
tomb  easily  —  any  newsboy  on  the  street  can  point  the 
way  to  it.  He  is  buried  with  others  of  his  faith  in  the 
quiet  yard  of  Christ  church  at  Fifth  and  Arch  streets. 
And  in  order  that  the  passing  world  may  sometimes  stop 
to  do  him  the  homage  of  a  passing  thought,  a  single 
section  of  the  old  brick  wall  has  been  cut  away  and  re 
placed  by  an  iron  grating.  Through  that  grating  you 
may  see  his  tomb  —  a  slab  of  stone  sunk  flat,  for  he  was 
an  unpretentious  man  —  and  on  its  face  read: 

"Benjamin  and  Deborah  Franklin.    1790." 

Beyond  that  graveyard  you  will  see  a  meeting 
house  of  the  Friends,  one  of  the  best-known  in  all  that 
grave  city  which  their  patron  founded.  It  is  the  meet 
ing-house  of  the  Free  Quakers,  and  to  its  building  both 
Franklin  and  Washington,  himself,  lent  a  liberal  aid. 
And  you  can  still  see  upon  a  tablet  set  in  one  of  its  faded 
brick  walls  these  four  lines: 

"By  General  Subscription, 
For  the  Free  Quakers. 
Erected  A.  D.  1783, 
Of  the  Empire  8." 

That  "  Empire  8  "  has  puzzled  a  good  many  tourists. 
In  a  republic  and  erected  upon  the  gathering-place  of 
as  simple  a  sect  as  the  Friends  it  provokes  many 
questions. 

"  They  must  have  thought  it  was  goin'  to  be  an  empire 
like  that  French  Empire  that  was  started  by  the  war  in 
'75,"  the  aged  caretaker  patiently  will  tell  you  with  a 
shake  of  the  head  which  shows  that  he  has  been  asked 
that  very  question  many  times  before  and  never  found 
a  really  good  answer  for  it. 

A  few  squares  below  its  graveyard  is  Christ  church 


84      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

itself  —  a  splendid  example  of  the  Georgian  architecture 
as  we  find  it  in  the  older  cities  close  to  the  Atlantic  sea 
board.  Designed  by  the  architect  of  Independence  Hall 
it  is  second  to  that  great  building  only  in  historic  inter 
est.  Its  grave-yard  is  a  roster  of  the  Philadelphia  aris 
tocracy  of  other  days.  In  its  exquisitely  beautiful 
steeple  there  hangs  a  chime  of  eight  bells  brought  in  the 
long  ago  from  old  England  in  Captain  Budden's  clip 
per-ship  Matilda  freight-free.  And  local  tradition  re 
lates  that  for  many  years  thereafter  the  approach  of  Cap 
tain  Budden's  Matilda  up  the  Delaware  was  invari 
ably  heralded  by  a  merry  peal  of  welcome  from  the 
bells. 

Philadelphia  is  rich  in  such  treasure-houses  of  history. 
To  the  traveler,  whose  bent  runs  to  such  pursuits,  she 
offers  a  rare  field.  In  the  oldest  part  of  the  city  there 
is  hardly  a  square  that  will  not  offer  some  landmark 
ripe  with  tradition  and  rich  with  interest.  Time  has  laid 
a  gentle  hand  upon  the  City  of  Brotherly  Love.  And  no 
American,  who  considers  himself  worthy  of  the  name, 
can  afford  not  to  visit  at  least  once  in  his  lifetime  the 
greatest  of  our  shrines  —  Independence  Hall.  Within 
recent  years  this  fine  old  building  has,  like  many  of  its 
fellows,  undergone  reconstruction.  But  the  workmen 
have  labored  faithfully  and  truthfully  and  the  old  State 
House  today,  in  all  its  details,  is  undoubtedly  very  much 
as  it  stood  at  the  time  of  the  signing  of  the  Declaration. 
It  still  houses  the  Liberty  Bell,  that  intrepid  and  seem 
ingly  tireless  tourist  who  visits  all  the  world's  fairs 
with  a  resigned  patience  that  might  well  commend  itself 
to  human  travelers. 

Around  these  landmarks  of  colonial  Philadelphia  there 
ebbs  and  flows  the  human  tides  of  the  modern  city.  The 
windows  of  what  is  today  the  finest  as  well  as  the  largest 
printing-house  in  the  land  look  down  upon  the  tree-filled 


Where  William  Penn  looks  down  upon  the  town  he 
loved  so  well 


PHILADELPHIA  85 

square  in  which  stands  Independence  Hall.  A  little 
while  ago  this  printing  concern  looked  down  upon  the 
grave  of  that  earlier  printer  —  Franklin.  But  growth 
made  it  necessary  to  move  from  Arch  street  —  the  bus 
iest  and  the  noisiest  if  not  the  narrowest  of  all  precise 
pattern  of  parallel  roads  that  William  Penn  —  the  Pro 
prietor  of  other  days  —  laid  back  from  the  Delaware  to 
the  Schuylkill  river. 

One  square  from  Arch  street  is  Market,  designed  years 
ago  by  the  far-sighted  Quaker  to  be  just  what  it  is  today 
—  a  great  commercial  thoroughfare  of  one  of  the  met 
ropolitan  cities  of  America.  At  its  feet  the  ferries 
cross  the  Delaware  to  the  fair  New  Jersey  land.  Up  its 
course  to  the  City  Hall  —  or  as  the  Philadelphian  will 
always  have  it,  the  Public  Buildings  —  are  department 
stores,  one  of  them  a  commercial  monument  to  the  man 
who  made  the  modern  department  store  possible  and  so 
doing  became  the  greatest  merchant  of  his  generation. 
Department  stores,  big  and  little,  two  huge  railroad 
terminals  which  seem  always  thronged  —  beyond  the 
second  of  them  desolation  for  Market  street  —  a  dreary 
course  to  the  Schuylkill ;  beyond  that  stream  it  exists  as 
a  mere  utility  street,  a  chief  artery  to  the  great  residence 
region  known  as  West  Philadelphia. 

Arch  street,  Market  street,  then  the  next  —  Chestnut 
street.  Now  the  heart  of  your  real  Philadelphian  begins 
to  beat  staccato.  Other  lands  may  have  their  Market 
streets  —  your  San  Francisco  man  may  hardly  admit 
that  his  own  Market  street  could  ever  be  equaled  —  but 
there  is  only  one  Chestnut  street  in  all  this  land. 

The  big  department  stores  have  given  way  to  smaller 
shops  —  shops  where  Philadelphia  quality  likes  to 
browse  and  bargain.  Small  restaurants,  designed  quite 
largely  to  meet  the  luncheon  and  afternoon  tea  tastes 
of  feminine  shoppers  show  themselves.  Upon  a  prom 
inent  corner  there  stands  a  very  unusual  grocery  shop. 


86      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

That  is,  it  must  be  a  grocery  shop  for  that  is  what  it 
advertises  itself,  but  in  the  window  is  a  papier-mache 
reproduction  of  the  table'-d'hote  luncheon  that  it  serves 
upon  its  balcony,  and  within  there  are  quotations  from 
Shakespeare  upon  the  wall  and  "  best-sellers  "  sold  upon 
its  counters. 

And  after  Chestnut  street,  which  runs  the  gamut  from 
banks  to  retail  shops  and  then  to  smart  homes,  Walnut 
street.  We  have  been  tempted  to  call  Walnut  "  the 
Street  of  the  Little  Tailors,"  for  so  many  shops  have  they 
from  Seventh  street  to  Broad  that  one  comes  quickly  to 
know  why  Philadelphia  men  are  as  immaculate  to  clothes 
as  to  good  manners.  Between  the  little  shops  of  the 
tailors  there  are  other  little  shops  —  places  where  one 
may  find  old  prints,  old  books,  old  bits  of  china  or  bronze. 
Walnut  street  runs  its  course  and  at  the  intersection  of 
Broad  is  a  group  of  four  great  hotels,  two  of  them  prop 
erly  hyphenated,  after  modern  fashion.  Beyond  Broad 
it  changes.  No  shops  may  now  profane  it,  for  it  now 
penetrates  the  finest  residential  district  of  Philadelphia. 
Here  is  the  highway  of  aristocracy  and  in  a  little  way 
will  be  Rittenhouse  square  —  the  holy  of  holies. 

Just  as  Market  street  in  San  Francisco  forms  the  sharp 
demarking  line  between  possible  and  impossible  so  does 
Market  street,  Philadelphia,  perform  a  similar  service 
for  William  Penn's  city.  You  must  live  "  below  "  Mar 
ket  street,  which  means  somewhere  south  of  that  thor 
oughfare.  "  No  one  "  lives  "  above  Market,"  which  is, 
of  course,  untrue,  for  many  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
very  estimable  folk  live  north  of  that  street.  In  fact, 
two-thirds  of  the  entire  population  of  Philadelphia  live 
north  of  Market,  which  runs  in  a  straight  line  almost 
east  and  west.  But  society  —  and  society  in  Philadel 
phia  rules  with  no  unsteady  hand  —  decries  that  a  few 
city  squares  south  of  Market  and  west  of  Broad  shall 
be  its  own  demesne.  You  may  have  your  country  house 


PHILADELPHIA  87 

out  in  the  lovely  suburbs  of  the  town,  if  you  will,  and 
there  are  no  finer  suburban  villages  in  all  the  world  than 
Bryn  Mawr  or  Ogontz  or  Jenkintown  —  but  if  you  live 
in  town  you  must  live  in  the  correct  part  of  the  town  or 
give  up  social  ambitions.  And  there  is  little  use  carrying 
social  ambitions  to  Philadelphia  anyway.  No  city  in 
the  land,  not  even  Boston  or  Charleston,  opens  its  doors 
more  reluctantly  to  strange  faces  and  strange  names, 
than  open  these  doors  of  the  old  houses  roundabout  Rit- 
tenhouse  square.  And  for  man  or  woman  coming  resi 
dent  to  the  town  to  hope  to  enter  one  of  Philadelphia's 
great  annual  Assemblies  within*  a  generation  is  quite 
out  of  the  possibilities. 

Rittenhouse  square  may  seem  warm  and  friendly  and 
democratic  with  its  neat  pattern  of  paths  and  grass- 
plots,  its  rather  genteel  loungers  upon  its  shadiest 
benches,  the  children  of  the  nurse-maids  playing  beneath 
the  trees.  But  the  great  houses  that  look  down  into  it 
are  neither  warm  nor  friendly  nor  democratic.  They 
are  merely  gazing  at  you  —  and  inquiring  —  inquiring 
if  you  please,  if  you  have  Pennsylvania  blood  and  breed 
ing.  If  you  have  not,  closed  houses  they  are  to  remain 
to  you.  But  if  you  do  possess  these  things  they  will 
open  —  with  as  warm  and  friendly  a  hospitality  as  you 
may  find  in  the  land.  There  is  the  first  trace  of  the 
Southland  in  the  hospitality  of  Philadelphia,  just  as  her 
red  brick  houses,  her  brick  pavement  and  her  old-fash 
ioned  use  of  the  market,  smack  of  the  cities  that  rest  to 
the  south  rather  than  those  to  the  north. 

To  give  more  than  a  glimpse  of  the  concrete  Philadel 
phia  within  these  limits  is  quite  out  of  the  question.  It 
would  mean  incidentally  the  telling  of  her  great  charities, 
her  wonderful  museum  of  art  whose  winter  show  is  an 
annual  pilgrimage  for  the  painters  from  all  the  eastern 
portion  of  the  land,  of  her  vast  educational  projects. 


88      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Two  of  these  last  deserve  a  passing  mention,  however. 
One  might  never  write  of  Philadelphia  and  forget  her 
university  —  that  great  institution  upon  the  west  bank 
of  the  Schuylkill  which  awoke  almost  overnight  to  find 
itself  man-size,  a  man-sized  opportunity  awaiting.  And 
one  should  not  speak  of  the  University  of  Pennsylvania 
and  forget  the  college  that  Stephen  Girard  founded.  Of 
course  Girard  College  is  not  a  college  at  all  but  a  great 
charity  school  for  boys,  but  it  is  none  the  less  interesting 
because  of  that. 

The  story  of  Stephen  Girard  is  the  story  of  the  man 
who  was  not  alone  the  richest  man  in  Philadelphia  but 
the  richest  man  in  America  as  well.  But  among  all  his 
assets  he  did  not  have  happiness.  His  beautiful  young 
wife  was  sent  to  a  madhouse  early  in  her  life,  and  Girard 
shut  himself  off  from  the  companionship  of  men,  save 
the  necessity  of  business  dealings  with  them.  He  was 
known  as  a  stern,  irascible,  hard  screw  of  a  man  —  im 
mensely  just  but  seemingly  hardly  human.  Only  once 
did  Philadelphia  ever  see  him  as  anything  else  —  and 
that  was  in  the  yellow  fever  panic  at  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century  when  Stephen  Girard,  its  great  mer 
chant  and  banker,  went  out  and  with  his  own  purse  and 
his  own  hands  took  his  part  in  alleviating  the  disaster. 
It  was  many  years  afterward  that  Girard  College  came 
into  being;  its  center  structure  a  Greek  temple,  probably 
the  most  beautiful  of  its  sort  in  the  land,  and  its  stern 
provision  against  the  admission  of  clergymen  even  to 
the  grounds  of  the  institution,  a  reflection  of  its  found 
er's  hard  mind  coming  down  through  the  years.  Today 
it  is  a  great  charity  school,  taking  boys  at  eight  years  of 
age  and  keeping  them,  if  need  be,  until  they  are  eighteen, 
and  in  all  those  years  not  only  schooling  but  housing 
them  and  feeding  them  as  well  as  the  finest  private-school 
in  all  this  land. 


PHILADELPHIA  89 

And  as  Girard  College  and  the  University  of  Pennsyl 
vania  stand  among  the  colleges  of  America,  so  stands 
Fairmount  Park  among  the  public  pleasure  grounds  of 
the  country.  It  was  probably  the  first  public  park  in  the 
whole  land,  and  a  lady  who  knows  her  Philadelphia 
thoroughly  has  found  many  first  things  in  Philadelphia 
—  the  first  newspaper,  the  first  magazine,  the  first  circu 
lating  library,  the  first  medical  college,  the  first  corporate 
bank,  the  first  American  warship,  the  unfurling  of  the 
first  American  flag,  not  least  of  these  the  first  real 
world's  fair  ever  held  upon  this  side  of  the  Atlantic. 
For  it  was  the  Centennial  which  not  only  made  Fairmount 
Park  a  resort  of  nation-wide  reputation,  not  only  opened 
new  possibilities  of  amusement  to  a  land  which  had  al 
ways  taken  itself  rather  seriously,  but  marked  the  turning 
of  an  era  in  the  artistic  and  the  social,  as  well  as  the  po 
litical  life  of  the  United  States.  The  Centennial  was, 
judged  by  the  standard  of  the  greatest  expositions  that 
followed  it,  a  rather  crude  affair.  Its  exhibits  were 
simple,  the  buildings  that  housed  them  fantastic  and 
barnlike.  And  the  weather-man  assisted  in  the  general 
enjoyment  by  sending  the  mercury  to  unprecedented 
heights  that  entire  summer.  Philadelphia  is  never  very 
chilly  in  the  summer;  the  northern  folk  who  went  to  it 
in  that  not- to-be-forgotten  summer  of  1876  felt  that  they 
had  penetrated  the  tropics.  And  yet  when  it  was  all 
over  America  had  the  pleased  feeling  of  a  boy  who  finds 
that  he  can  do  something  new.  And  even  sober  folk 
felt  that  a  beginning  had  been  made  toward  a  wider  view 
of  life  across  the  United  States. 

It  is  nearly  forty  years  since  the  Centennial  sent  the 
tongues  of  a  whole  land  buzzing  and  the  two  huge  struc 
tures  that  it  left  in  Fairmount  Park  have  begun  to  grow 
old,  but  the  park  itself  is  as  fresh  and  as  new  as  in  the 
days  of  its  beginning,  and  there  are  parts  of  it  that  were 


90      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

half  a  century  old  before  the  Centennial  opened  its  doors. 
There  are  many  provisions  for  recreation  within  its  great 
boundaries,  boating  upon  the  Schuylkill,  the  drives  that 
border  that  river,  the  further  drive  that  leaves  it  and 
sweeps  through  the  lovely  glen  of  the  Wissahickon. 

The  Wissahickon  Drive  is  a  joy  that  does  not  come  to 
every  Philadelphian.  That  winding  road  is  barred  to 
sight-seeing  cars  and  automobiles  of  indiscriminate  sort 
because  the  quality  of  the  town  prefers  to  keep  it  to 
itself.  So  runs  Philadelphia;  a  town  which  is  in  many 
ways  sordid,  which  has  probably  the  full  share  of  suf 
fering  that  must  come  to  every  large  city,  but  which  bars 
its  fine  drive  to  the  proletariat  while  Rittenhouse  square 
blandly  wonders  why  Socialism  makes  progress  across 
the  land.  Philadelphia  does  not  progress  —  in  any  broad 
social  sense.  She  plays  cricket  —  splendidly  —  is  one  of 
the  few  American  towns  in  which  that  fine  English  game 
flourishes  —  and  she  dispenses  her  splendid  charity  in 
the  same  senseless  fashion  as  sixty  years  ago.  But  she 
does  not  understand  the  trend  of  things  today  —  and  so 
she  bars  her  Wissahickon  Drive  except  to  those  who  drive 
in  private  carriages  or  their  own  motor  car,  and  delivers 
the  finest  of  the  old  Colonial  houses  within  her  Fairmount 
Park  area  to  clubs  —  of  quality. 

Personally  we  much  prefer  John  Bartram's  house  to 
any  of  those  splendid  old  country-seats  within  Fairmount. 
To  find  Bartram's  Gardens  you  need  a  guide  —  or  a  really 
intelligent  street-car  conductor.  For  there  is  not  even 
a  marking  sign  upon  its  entrance,  although  Philadelphia 
professes  to  maintain  it  as  a  public  park.  Little  has 
been  done,  however,  to  the  property,  and  for  that  he 
who  comes  to  it  almost  as  a  shrine  has  reason  to  be  pro 
foundly  thankful.  For  the  old  house  stands,  with  its 
barns,  almost  exactly  as  it  stood  in  the  days  of  the  great 
naturalist.  One  may  see  where  his  hands  placed  the 
great  stone  inscribed  "  John- Ann  Bartram  1731  "  within 


PHILADELPHIA  91 

its  gable;  on  the  side  wall  another  tablet  chiseled  there 
forty  years  later,  and  reading: 

"Tis  God  alone,  almighty  Lord, 
The  holy  one  by  me  adored." 

Neglect  may  have  come  upon  the  gardens  but  even 
John  Bartram  could  not  deny  the  wild  beauty  of  these 
untrammeled  things.  The  gentle  river  is  still  at  the  foot 
of  the  garden,  within  it,  most  of  the  shrubs  and  trees  he 
planted  are  still  growing  into  green  old  age.  And  next 
to  his  fine  old  simple  house  one  sees  the  tangled  yew- 
tree  and  the  Jerusalem  "  Christ's-thorn  "  that  his  own 
hands  placed  within  the  ground. 

Philadelphia  prides  herself  upon  her  dominant  Amer 
icanism —  and  with  no  small  reason.  She  insists  that 
by  keeping  the  doorways  to  her  houses  sharply  barred 
she  maintains  her  native  stock,  her  trained  and  respon 
sible  stock,  if  you  please,  dominant.  She  avers  that  she 
protects  American  institutions.  New  York  may  become 
truly  cosmopolitan,  may  ape  foreign  manners  and  for 
eign  customs.  Philadelphia  in  her  quiet,  gentle  way  pre 
fers  to  preserve  those  of  her  fathers. 

One  instance  will  suffice.  She  has  preserved  the 
American  Sabbath  —  almost  exactly  as  it  existed  half  a 
century  ago.  As  to  the  merits  and  demerits  of  that  very 
thing,  they  have  no  place  here.  But  the  fact  remains 
that  Philadelphia  has  accomplished  it.  From  Saturday 
night  to  Monday  morning  a  great  desolation  comes  upon 
the  town.  There  are  no  theaters  not  even  masquerad 
ing  grotesquely  as  "  sacred  concerts,"  no  open  saloons, 
no  baseball  games,  no  moving  pictures  —  nothing  exhib 
iting  for  admission  under  a  tight  statute  of  Pennsylvania, 
in  effect  now  for  more  than  a  century.  And  it  is  only 
a  few  years  ago  that  the  churches  were  permitted  to 
stretch  chains  across  the  streets  during  the  hours  of  their 


92      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

services.  A  few  bad  fires,  however,  with  the  fire-engines 
becoming  entangled  with  the  chains  and  this  custom  was 
abandoned.  But  the  churches  are  still  open,  and  they 
are  well  attended.  It  is  an  old-fashioned  Sabbath  and 
it  seems  very  good  indeed  to  old-fashioned  Americans. 
But  upon  the  other  six  days  of  the  week  she  offers  a 
plenitude  of  comfort  and  of  amusement.  She  is  accus 
tomed  to  good  living  —  her  oysters,  her  red-snappers, 
and  her  scrapple  are  justly  famous.  She  is  accustomed 
to  good  playing.  In  the  summer  she  has  far  more  than 
Fairmount  Park.  Atlantic  City — our  American  Brighton 

—  is    just    fifty-six    miles    distant    both    in    crow-flight 
and  in  the  even  path  of  the  railroads,  and  because  of  their 
wonderful  high-speed  service  many  Philadelphians  com 
mute  back  and  forth  there  all  summer  long. 

For  the  old  Red  City  is  a  paradise  for  commuters. 
Those  few  blocks  aroundabout  Rittenhouse  square  that 
her  social  rulers  have  set  aside  as  being  elect  for  city 
residence,  long  since  have  grown  all  too  small  for  a  great 
city  —  the  great  monotonous  home  sections  north  of 
Market  and  west  of  the  Schuylkill  are  hot  and  dreary. 
So  he  who  can,  builds  a  stone  house  out  in  the  lovely 
vicinage  of  the  great  city,  and  when  you  are  far  away 
from  the  high  tower  of  the  Public  Buildings  and  find 
two  Philadelphians  having  joyous  argument  you  will 
probably  find  that  they  are  discussing  the  relative  merits 
of  the  "Main  Line,"  the  "Central  Division"  or  the 
"  Reading." 

And  yet  the  best  of  Philadelphia  good  times  come  in 
winter.  She  is  famed  for  her  dances  and  her  dinners 

—  large  and  small.     She  is  inordinately  fond  of  recitals 
and  of  exhibitions.     She  is  a  great  theater-goer.     And 
local  tradition  makes  one  strict  demand.     In  New  York 
if  a  young  man  of  good  family  takes  a  young  girl  of  good 
family  to  the  theater  he  is  expected  to  take  her  in  a  car 
riage.     She  may  provide  the  carriage  —  for  these  days 


PHILADELPHIA  93 

have  become  shameful  —  but  it  must  be  a  carriage  none 
the  less.  In  Philadelphia  if  a  young  man  of  good  fam 
ily  takes  a  young  woman  of  good  family  to  the  theater 
he  must  not  take  her  in  a  carriage,  not  even  if  he  owns 
a  whole  fleet  of  limousines.  Therein  one  can  perhaps 
see  something  of  the  dominating  distinctions  between 
the  two  great  communities. 

But  what  Philadelphia  loves  most  of  all  is  a  public 
festival.  It  does  not  matter  so  very  much  just  what  is 
to  be  celebrated  as  long  as  there  can  be  a  fine  parade  up 
Broad  street  —  which  just  seems  to  have  been  really  de 
signed  for  fine  parades.  On  New  Year's  Eve  while  New 
York  is  drinking  itself  into  a  drunken  stupor,  Philadel 
phia  masks  and  disguises  —  and  parades.  On  every  pos 
sible  anniversary,  on  each  public  birthday  of  every  sort 
she  parades  —  with  the  gay  discordancies  of  many  bands, 
with  long  files  of  stolid  and  perspiring  policemen  or  fire 
men  or  civic  societies,  with  rumbling  top-heavy  floats 
that  mean  whatever  you  choose  to  have  them  mean. 
Rittenhouse  square  does  not  hold  aloof  from  these  festi 
vals.  Oh,  no,  indeed!  Rittenhouse  square  disguises 
itself  as  grandfather  or  grandmother  or  as  any  of  the 
many  local  heroes  and  rides  within  the  parade  —  more 
likely  upon  the  floats.  The  parades  are  invariably  well 
done.  And  the  proletariat  of  Philadelphia  comes  out 
from  the  side  streets  and  makes  a  double  black  wall  of 
humanity  for  the  long  miles  of  Broad  street. 

There  is  something  reminiscent  of  Bourbon  France 
in  the  way  that  Bourbon  Rittenhouse  square  dispenses 
these  festivals  unto  the  rest  of  the  town.  It  is  all  very 
diaphanous  and  very  artificial  but  it  is  very  sensuous  and 
beautiful  withal,  and  perhaps  the  rest  of  the  town  for  a 
night  forgets  some  of  its  sordidness  and  misery.  And 
the  picture  that  one  of  these  celebrations  makes  upon 
the  mind  of  a  stranger  is  indelible. 

Like  all  of  such  fetes  it  gains  its  greatest  glory  at  dusk. 


94      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

As  twilight  comes  the  strident  colors  of  the  city  fade; 
it  becomes  a  thing  of  shapes  and  shadows  —  even  the 
restless  crowd  is  tired  and  softened.  Then  the  genius 
of  electricity  comes  to  transform  workaday  land  into 
fairyland  and  all  these  shapes  and  shadows  sharpen  — 
this  time  in  living  glowing  lines  of  fire.  It  is  time  for 
men  to  exult,  to  forget  that  they  have  ever  been  tired. 
Such  is  the  setting  that  modern  America  can  give  a 
parade.  Father  Penn  stands  on  his  tall  tower  above  it 
all,  the  most  commanding  figure  of  his  town.  Below 
him  the  searchlights  play  and  a  million  incandescents 
glow;  the  shuffling  of  the  crowds,  the  faint  cadences  of 
the  band,  the  echoes  of  the  cheering  crowd  come  up 
to  him.  But  he  does  not  move.  His  hands,  his  great 
bronze  hands,  are  spread  in  benediction  over  the  great 
gay  sturdy  city  which  he  brought  into  existence  these 
long  years  ago. 


5 
THE  MONUMENTAL  CITY 

IF  you  approach  Philadelphia  by  dusty  highway,  it  is 
quite  as  appropriate  that  you  come  to  Baltimore  by 
water  highway.  A  multitude  of  them  run  out  'from  her 
brisk  and  busy  harbor  and  not  all  of  them  find  their 
way  to  the  sea.  In  fact  one  of  the  most  fascinating  of 
all  of  them  leads  to  Philadelphia  —  an  ancient  canal  dug 
when  the  railroad  was  being  born  and  in  all  these  years 
a  busy  and  a  useful  water-carrier.  If  you  are  a  tourist 
and  time  is  not  a  spurring  object,  take  the  little  steamer 
which  runs  through  the  old  canal  from  the  city  of  Wil 
liam  Penn  to  the  city  of  Lord  Baltimore.  It  is  one  of 
the  nicest  one-day  trips  that  we  know  in  all  the  east  — 
and  apparently  the  one  that  is  the  least  known.  Few 
gazetteers  or  tourist-guides  recommend  or  even  notice 
it.  And  yet  it  remains  one  of  the  most  attractive  single- 
day  journeys  by  water  that  we  have  ever  taken. 

If  you  will  only  scan  your  atlas  you  will  find  that 
nature  has  offered  slight  aid  to  such  a  single-day  voyage. 
She  builded  no  direct  way  herself  but  long  ago  man 
made  up  the  omission.  He  dug  the  Chesapeake  and 
Delaware  canal  in  the  very  year  that  railroading  was 
born  within  the  United  States.  For  remember  that  in 
1829  the  dreamers,  who  many  times  build  the  future, 
saw  the  entire  nation  a  great  network  of  waterways  — 
natural  and  artificial.  They  builded  the  Chesapeake  and 
Delaware  canal  bigger  than  any  that  had  gone  before. 
No  mere  mule-drawn  barges  were  to  monopolize  it.  It 

95 


96      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

was  designed  for  river  and  bay  craft  —  a  highway  for 
vessels  of  considerable  tonnage. 

You  arrive  at  this  canal  after  sailing  three  hours 
down  the  Delaware  river  from  Philadelphia  —  past  the 
Navy  Yard  at  League  island,  the  piers  and  jetties  at 
Marcus  Hook  that  help  to  keep  navigation  open  through 
out  the  winter  and  many  and  many  a  town  whose  age 
does  not  detract  from  all  its  charm.  The  river  widens 
into  a  great  estuary  of  the  sea.  The  narrow  procession 
of  inbound  and  outbound  craft  files  through  a  thin  chan 
nel  that  finally  widens  in  a  really  magnificent  fairway. 

Suddenly  your  steamer  turns  sharply  toward  the  star 
board,  toward  another  of  the  sleepy  little  towns  that  you 
have  been  watching  all  the  way  down  from  Philadelphia 
—  the  man  who  knows  and  who  stands  beside  you  on 
the  deck  will  tell  you  that  it  is  Delaware  City  —  and 
right  there  under  a  little  clump  of  trees  is  the  beginning 
of  the  canal.  You  can  see  it  plainly,  with  its  entrance 
lock  and  guarding  light,  and  if  the  day  be  Sunday  or 
some  holiday  the  townfolk  will  be  down  under  the  trees 
watching  the  steamer  enter  the  lock.  It  is  not  much  of 
a  lock  —  scarcely  eleven  inches  of  raise  at  the  flow  of 
the  tide  —  but  it  serves  to  protect  the  languid  stretch  of 
canal  that  reaches  a  long  way  inland.  This  gateway 
is  a  busy  one  at  all  times,  for  the  Chesapeake  and  Dela 
ware  is  one  of  the  few  old-time  canals  that  has  retained 
its  prestige  and  its  traffic.  An  immense  freight  tonnage 
passes  through  it  in  addition  to  the  day-boats  and  the 
night-boats  between  Philadelphia  and  Baltimore.  More 
over,  the  motor  boats  are  already  finding  it  of  great 
service  as  an  important  link  in  the  inside  water-route 
that  stretches  north  and  south  for  a  considerable  distance 
along  the  Atlantic  coast. 

Engines  go  at  quarter-speed  through  the  thirteen  miles 
of  the  canal  and  the  man  who  prefers  to  take  his  travel 


•  ~~*€BiH§- 

ff 


f 


I 


BALTIMORE  97 

fast  has  no  place  upon  the  boat.  Four  miles  an  hour  is 
its  official  speed  limit  and  even  then  the  "  wash "  of 
larger  craft  is  frequently  destructive  to  the  banks.  But 
what  of  that  speed  limit  with  a  good  magazine  in  your 
hands  and  a  slowly  changing  vista  of  open  country  ever 
spread  before  your  hungry  eyes?  You  approach  swing- 
bridges  with  distinction,  they  slowly  unfold  at  the  sharp 
order  of  the  boat's  whistle,  holding  back  ancient  nags 
of  little  Delaware,  drawing  mud-covered  buggies;  heavy 
Conestoga  wagons  filled  with  farm  produce  for  the  towns 
and  cities  to  the  north ;  sometimes  a  big  automobile  snort 
ing  and  puffing  as  if  in  rage  at  a  few  minutes  of  en 
forced  delay. 

On  the  long  stretches  between  the  bridges  the  canal 
twists  and  turns  as  if  finding  its  way,  railroad  fashion, 
between  increasing  slight  elevations.  Sometimes  it  is 
very  wide  and  the  tow-path  side  —  for  sailing-craft  are 
often  drawn  by  mules  through  it  —  is  a  slender  embank 
ment  reaching  across  a  broad  expanse  of  water.  You 
meet  whole  flotillas  of  freighters  all  the  way  and  when 
edging  your  way  past  them  you  throw  your  Philadelphia 
morning  paper  into  their  wheel-houses  you  win  real 
thanks.  All  the  way  the  country  changes  its  variety  — 
and  does  not  lose  its  fascination. 

So  sail  to  Baltimore.  At  Chesapeake  City  you  are 
done  with  the  canal,  just  when  it  may  have  begun  to  tire 
you  ever  and  ever  so  slightly.  Your  vessel  drops 
through  a  deep  lock  into  the  Back  creek,  an  estuary  of 
the  Elk  river.  The  Elk  river  in  turn  is  an  estuary  of 
Chesapeake  bay  and  you  are  upon  one  of  the  remote 
tendons  of  that  really  marvelous  system  of  waterways 
that  has  its  focal  point  in  Hampton  Roads  and  reaches 
for  thousands  of  miles  into  Maryland,  Pennsylvania, 
Virginia  and  North  Carolina. 

You  sweep  through  the  Elk  river  and  then  through  the 
upper  waters  of  the  Chesapeake  bay,  just  born  from  the 


98      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

yellow  flood  of  the  Susquehanna,  as  the  day  dies.  As 
the  sun  is  nearly  down,  your  ship  turns  sharply,  leaves 
the  Bay  and  begins  the  ascent  of  the  Patapsco  river. 
Signs  of  a  nearby  city,  a  great  city  if  you  please,  multi 
ply.  There  are  shipbuilding  plants  upon  distant  shores, 
the  glares  of  foundry  cupolas,  multiplying  commerce  — 
Baltimore  is  close  at  hand. 

And  so  you  sail  into  Baltimore  —  into  that  lagoon- 
like  harbor  at  the  very  heart  of  the  town.  The  steam 
boats  that  go  sailing  further  down  the  Chesapeake  that 
poke  their  inquisitive  noses  into  the  reaches  of  the  Poco- 
moke,  the  Pianatank,  the  Nanticoke,  the  Rappahannock, 
the  Cocohannock,  the  Big  Wicomico  and  the  Little 
Wicomico  —  all  of  these  water  highways  of  a  land  of 
milk  and  honey  and  only  rivaling  one  another  in  their 
quiet  lordly  beauty  —  sail  in  and  out  of  Baltimore. 
There  are  many  of  these  steamers  as  you  come  into  the 
inner  harbor  of  the  city,  tightly  tethered  together  with 
noses  against  the  pier  just  as  we  used  to  see  horses  tied 
closely  to  one  another  at  the  hitching-rails,  at  fair-time  in 
the  home  town  years  ago.  And  they  speak  the  strength 
of  the  manorial  city  of  Lord  Baltimore.  For  the  city 
that  sits  upon  the  hills  above  her  landlocked  little  harbor 
draws  her  strength  from  a  rich  country  for  many  miles 
roundabout.  For  many  years  she  has  set  there,  confident 
in  her  strength,  leading  in  progress,  firm  in  resource. 

For  well  you  may  call  Baltimore  —  quite  as  much  as 
Philadelphia  —  a  city  of  first  things.  There  are  almost 
too  many  of  these  to  be  recounted  here.  It  is  worthy 
of  note,  however,  that  in  Baltimore  came  the  first  use 
in  America  of  illuminating  gas,  which  drove  out  the 
candle  and  the  oil  lamp  as  relics  of  a  past  age.  Balti 
more's  historic  playhouse,  Peale's  Museum,  was  the  first 
in  all  the  land  to  be  set  aglow  by  the  new  illuminant. 
And  one  may  well  imagine  the  glow  of  pride  also  that 
dwelt  that  memorable  evening  upon  the  faces  of  all  the 


BALTIMORE  99 

folk  who  were  gathered  in  that  ancient  temple  of  the 
drama. 

And  yet  there  was  an  earlier  "  first  thing "  of  even 
greater  importance  —  the  hour  of  inspiration  a  century 
ago  when  an  enemy's  guns  were  trained  on  that  stout 
old  guardian  of  the  town's  harbor,  Fort  McHenry  —  an 
engagement  to  be  remembered  almost  solely  by  the  fact 
that  the  "  Star  Spangled  Banner  "  first  lodged  itself  in 
the  mind  of  man.  But  to  our  minds  the  greatest  of  the 
many,  many  "  first  things  "  of  Baltimore  was  the  coming 
of  the  railroad.  For  the  first  real  railroad  system  in 
America  —  the  Baltimore  &  Ohio  —  was  planned  by  the 
citizens  of  the  old  town  —  ambitious  dreamers  each  of 
them  —  as  an  offset  to  those  rival  cities  to  the  north, 
Philadelphia  and  New  York,  who  were  creating  canals 
to  develop  their  commerce  —  at  the  expense  of  the  com 
merce  of  Baltimore.  So  it  was  that  a  little  group  of 
merchants  gathered  in  the  house  of  George  Brown,  on 
the  evening  of  the  I2th  of  February,  1827,  a  date  not 
to  be  regarded  lightly  in  the  annals  of  the  land.  For 
out  of  that  meeting  was  to  come  a  new  America  —  a 
growing  land  that  refused  to  be  bound  by  high  mountains 
or  wide  rivers.  Not  that  the  little  gathering  of  Balti 
more  merchants  pointed  an  instant  or  an  easy  path  to 
quick  prosperity.  The  path  of  the  Baltimore  &  Ohio 
was  hedged  about  for  many  years  with  trials  and  disap 
pointments.  It  was  more  than  a  quarter  of  a  century 
before  it  was  a  railroad  worthy  of  the  name,  meeting 
even  in  part  the  ideals  and  dreams  of  the  men  who  had 
planned  it  to  bring  their  city  in  touch  with  the  Ohio  and 
the  other  navigable  rivers  of  the  unknown  West.  And 
at  the  beginning  it  was  a  fog-blinded  path  that  con 
fronted  them.  Over  in  England  an  unknown  youth  was 
experimenting  with  that  uncertain  toy,  the  steam  loco 
motive,  while  a  Russian  gentleman  of  known  intelligence 
gravely  predicted  that  a  car  set  with  sails  to  go  before 


ioo    PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

the  wind  upon  its  rails  was  the  most  practical  form  of 
transportation.  And  it  is  worthy  of  mention  that  the 
earliest  of  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio  steam  locomotives  was 
beaten  in  a  neck-and-neck  race  toward  the  West  by  a 
stout  gray  horse.  The  name  of  the  old  locomotive  is 
still  recorded  in  the  annals  of  the  railroad  but  that  of  the 
gray  horse  is  lost  forever. 

To  know  and  to  love  the  Baltimore  of  today,  one  must 
know  and  love  the  Baltimore  of  yesterday.  He  must 
know  her  lore,  her  traditions,  her  first  families  —  the 
things  that  have  gone  to  make  the  modern  city.  He 
must  see,  as  through  magic  glasses,  the  Baltimore  of 
other  days,  the  city  that  came  into  her  own  within  a 
very  few  years  after  the  close  of  the  American  Revolu 
tion.  His  imagination  must  depict  that  stout  old  mer 
chant  and  banker,  Alexander  Brown;  Evan  Thomas, 
the  first  president  of  Baltimore's  own  railroad;  B.  H. 
Latrobe,  the  first  great  architect  and  engineer  that  a 
young  nation  should  come  to  know  and  whose  real 
memorial  is  in  certain  portions  of  the  great  Federal 
Capitol  at  Washington.  He  must  see  Winans,  the  car- 
builder,  and  Peter  Cooper,  tinkering  with  the  locomo 
tive.  He  may  turn  toward  less  commercial  things  and 
find  Rembrandt  Peale;  and  if  his  glasses  be  softened  by 
the  amber  tints  of  charity  he  may  see  a  drunkard  stag 
gering  through  the  streets  of  old  Baltimore  to  die  finally 
in  a  gutter,  while  some  men  put  their  fingers  to  their 
lips  and  whisper  that  "  Mr.  Poe's  Raven  may  be  liter 
ature  after  all." 

It  is  indeed  the  old  Baltimore  that  you  must  first  come 
to  know  and  to  love,  if  you  are  ever  to  understand  the 
personality  of  the  Baltimore  of  today.  The  new  Balti 
more  is  a  splendid  city.  Its  fine  new  homes,  its  many, 
many  schools  and  colleges  proclaim  that  here  is  a  center 


BALTIMORE  101 

of  real  culture;  its  great  churches,  its  theaters,  its 
modern  hotels,  its  broad  avenues  are  worthy  of  a  city 
of  six  hundred  thousand  humans.  Druid  Hill  Park  at 
the  back  of  the  new  Baltimore  is  worthy  of  a  city  of 
a  million  souls.  From  it  you  can  ride  or  stroll  down 
town  through  Eutaw  place,  that  broad  parked  avenue 
which  is  the  full  pride  of  the  new  Baltimore.  Suddenly 
you  turn  to  the  left,  pass  through  a  few  mean  streets, 
the  gray  pile  of  the  Fifth  Regiment  armory,  known 
nationally  because  of  the  great  conventions  that  have 
been  held  beneath  its  spreading  walls,  see  the  nearby 
tower  of  Mount  Royal  station  —  after  that  you  are  in 
the  region  of  the  uptown  hotels  and  theaters  —  thrust 
ing  themselves  into  the  long  lines  of  tight,  red-brick 
houses.  These  are  builded  after  the  fashion  of  the 
Philadelphia  houses,  even  as  to  their  white  marble  door 
steps,  and  yet  possess  a  charm  and  distinction  of  their 
own. 

There  are  many  of  these  old  houses  upon  this  really 
fine  street,  and  you  crane  your  neck  at  the  first  intersec 
tion  to  catch  its  name  upon  the  sign-post.  "  Charles 
Street "  it  reads  and  with  a  little  gladsome  memory  you 
recall  a  bit  of  verse  that  you  saw  a  long  time  ago  in  the 
Baltimore  Sun.  It  reads  somewhat  after  this  fashion : 

Its  heart  is  in  Mount  Vernon  square, 

Its  head  is  in  the  green  wood : 
Its  feet  are  stretched  along  the  ways 

Where  swarms  the  foreign  brood; 
A  modicum  of  Bon  Marche, 

That  sublimated  store  — 
And  Oh,  the  treasure  that  we  have 

In  Charles  street,  Baltimore! 

I  love  to  watch  the  moving  throng, 

The  afternoon  parade; 
The  coaches  rolling  home  to  tea, 

The  young  man  and  the  maid; 


102     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

The  gentlemen  who  dwell  in  clubs, 

The  magnates  of  the  town  — 
Oh,  Charles  street  has  a  smile  for  them, 

And  never  wears  a  frown! 

The  little  shops,  so  cool  and  sweet; 

The  finesse  and  the  grace 
Which  mark  the  mercantility 

Of  such  a  market-place; 
And  then  beyond  the  tempting  stores 

The  quietness  that  runs 
Into  the  calm  and  stately  square 

With  marble  denizens. 

The  little  and  the  larger  stores 

Are  tempting,  to  be  sure; 
But  they  are  only  half  the  charm 

That  Charles  street  holds  to  lure; 
For  here  and  there  along  the  way, 

How  sweet  the  homes  befall  — 
The  domicile  that  holds  his  Grace, 

The  gentle  Cardinal. 

The  mansions  with  pacific  mien 

Whose  windows  say  "  Come  in !  " 
The  touches  of  colonialness, 

The  farness  of  the  din 
That  rolls  a  city  league  away 

And  leaves  this  dainty  street 
A  cool  and  comfortable  spot 

Where  past  and  present  meet. 

A  measure  of  la  boulevard 

Before  whose  windows  pass 
The  madame  and  the  damoisel, 

The  gallant  and  the  lass; 
The  gravest  and  the  most  sedate, 

The  young  and  gay  it  calls ; 
And,  oh,  how  proper  over  it  — 

The  shadows  of  St.  Paul's! 

Dip  down  the  hill  and  well  away, 

The  southward  track  it  takes, 
O  fickleness,  how  many  quips, 

How  many  turns  it  takes! 


BALTIMORE  103 

But  ever  in  its  greensward  heart, 

From  head  to  foot  we  pour 
The  homage  of  our  love  of  it  — 

Dear  Charles  street,  Baltimore! 

You  are  standing  in  Mount  Vernon  square,  the  very 
heart  of  Charles  street.  It  is  a  little  open  place,  shaped 
like  a  Maltese  cross  rather  than  a  real  square  or  oblong, 
with  a  modern  apartment  house  looming  up  upon  it, 
whose  facades  of  French  Renaissance  give  a  slightly 
Parisian  touch  to  that  corner  of  the  square.  To  the  rest 
of  it,  bordered  with  sober,  old-time  mansions  there  is 
nothing  Parisian,  unless  you  stand  apart  and  gaze  at  the 
Monument,  which  sends  its  great  shaft  some  two  hun 
dred  feet  up  into  the  air.  There  are  such  columns  in 
Paris. 

It  is  the  Monument  that  dominates  Mount  Vernon 
square,  that  adds  variety  to  the  vistas  up  and  down 
through  Charles  street.  For  eighty  years  it  has  stood 
there,  straight  and  true ;  for  eighty  years  General  Wash 
ington  has  looked  down  into  the  gardens  of  Charles 
street,  upon  the  children  who  are  playing  there,  the  folk 
coming  home  at  night.  It  is  the  most  dominating  thing 
in  Baltimore,  which  has  never  acquired  the  sky-scraper 
habit,  and  because  of  it  we  have  always  known  Balti 
more  as  the  Monumental  City. 

Now  turn  from  the  modern  Baltimore  —  right  down 
this  street  which  runs  madly  off  the  sharp  hill  of  Mount 
Vernon  square.  Charles  street,  with  all  of  its  shops  and 
gentle  gayety,  is  quickly  left  behind.  At  the  foot  of  the 
hill  runs  Calvert  street  and  it  is  a  busy  and  a  somewhat 
sordid  way.  But  at  Calvert  street  rises  Calvert  station 
and  since  you  are  to  see  so  many  great  railroad  stations 
before  you  are  done  with  the  cities  'of  America,  take  a 
second  look  at  this.  Calvert  station  is  not  great.  It  is 
not  magnificent.  It  is  not  imposing.  It  is  old,  very, 


104     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

very  old  —  as  far  as  we  know  the  oldest  of  all  the  im 
portant  stations  that  are  still  in  use  today.  From  its 
smoky  trainshed  the  trains  have  been  going  up  the 
Northern  Central  toward  Harrisburg  and  the  Susque- 
hanna  country  —  the  farther  lands  beyond  —  since  1848. 
And  that  trainshed,  with  its  stout-pegged  wooden-trussed 
roof  held  aloft  on  two  rows  of  solid  stone  pillars,  seems 
good  for  another  sixty-five  years. 

Old  Baltimore  holds  tightly  to  its  ideals  of  yesterday. 
Over  in  another  of  the  older  parts  of  the  town  you  can 
still  find  Camden  station,  which  in  1857  was  not  only 
proclaimed  as  the  finest  railroad  terminal  that  was  ever 
built  but  that  ever  could  be  built,  still  in  use  and  a  busy 
place  indeed.  The  Eutaw  House,  spared  by  the  great 
fire  of  a  decade  ago,  but  finally  forced  to  close  its  doors 
in  the  face  of  the  competition  of  better  located  and  more 
elaborate  hostelries,  still  stands.  The  ancient  cathedral 
remains  a  great  lion,  the  old-time  red  shaft  of  the  Mer 
chants'  Tower  still  thrusts  itself  into  the  vista  as  you  look 
east  from  the  Monument  square  there  in  front  of  the 
Post  Office.  Across  the  harbor  you  can  find  Fort  Mc- 
Henry,  as  silent  sentinel  of  that  busy  place.  Balti 
more  does  not  easily  forget. 

And  here,  as  you  plunge  down  into  the  little  congested 
district  roundabout  Jones  Falls  you  are  at  last  in  the 
really  old  Baltimore.  The  streets  are  as  rambling  and 
as  crooked  as  old  Quebec.  Some  of  their  gutters  still 
run  with  sewage  although  it  is  to  be  fairly  said  to  the 
credit  of  the  town  that  she  is  today  fast  doing  away 
with  these.  And  once  in  a  time  you  can  stand  at  the 
open  door  of  an  oyster  establishment  and  watch  the 
negroes  shucking  those  bivalves  —  singing  as  they  work. 
For  just  below  Baltimore  is  a  great  habitat  of  the  oyster 
as  well  as  of  the  crab,  to  say  nothing  of  some  more  aristo 
cratic  denizens  —  the  diamond-back  terrapin  for  in 
stance.  Boys  with  trays  —  many  of  them  negroes  — 


BALTIMORE  105 

walk  the  wharves  and  streets  of  old  Baltimore  selling 
cold  deviled  crabs  at  five  cents  each.  Those  crabs  are 
uniformly  delicious,  and  the  boys  sell  them  as  freely  on 
the  streets  as  the  boys  down  in  Staunton  and  some  other 
Virginia  towns  sell  cold  chicken. 

Now  we  are  across  Jones  Falls  * —  that  unimpressive 
stream  that  gullies  through  Baltimore  —  and  plunging 
into  Old  Town.  Other  cities  may  boast  their  quartiers, 
Baltimore  has  Old  Town.  And  she  clings  to  the  name 
and  the  traditions  it  signifies  with  real  affection.  Here 
is  indeed  the  oldest  part  of  Old  Town  and  if  we  search 
quietly  through  its  narrow,  crowded  streets  we  may  still 
see  some  of  the  old  inns,  dating  well  back  into  the  eight 
eenth  century,  their  cluttered  court-yards  still  telling  in 
eloquent  silence  of  the  commotion  that  used  to  come  when 
the  coaches  started  forth  up  the  new  National  Pike  to 
Cumberland  or  distant  Wheeling,  north  to  York  and 
Philadelphia.  And  everywhere  are  the  little  old  houses 
of  that  earlier  day.  Even  in  the  more  distinctively  resi 
dential  sections  of  the  town  many  of  them  still  stand, 
and  they  are  so  very  much  like  toy  houses  enlarged  under 
some  powerful  glass  that  we  think  of  Spotless  Town 
and  those  wonderful  rhymes  that  we  used  to  see  above 
our  heads  in  the  street  cars.  But  they  represent  Balti 
more's  solution  of  her  housing  problem. 

For  she  has  no  tenements,  even  few  high-grade  apart 
ments.  She  has,  like  her  Quaker  neighbor  to  the  north, 
mile  upon  mile  of  little  red-brick  houses,  all  these  also 
with  white  door-steps  —  marble  many  times,  and  in  other 
times  wood,  kept  dazzling  and  immaculate  with  fresh 
paintings.  In  these  little  houses  Baltimore  lives.  You 

*  During  the  past  year  Baltimore  has  made  a  very  creditable 
progress  toward  building  an  important  commercial  street  over 
Jones  Falls;  thus  transforming  it  into  a  hidden,  tunneled  sewer. 
Residents  of  the  city  will  not  soon  forget,  however,  that  it  was 
at  Jones  Falls  that  the  engines  of  the  New  York  Fire  Depart 
ment  took  their  stand  and  halted  the  great  fire  of  1904. 

E.  H. 


io6     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

may  find  here  and  there  some  one  of  them  no  more  than 
ten  or  twelve  feet  in  width  and  but  two  stories  high,  but  it 
is  a  house  and  while  you  occupy  it,  your  own.  And  the 
rent  of ,  it  is  ridiculously  low  —  compared  even  with  the 
lower-priced  apartments  and  the  tenements  of  New  York. 
That  low  rent,  combined  with  the  profuse  and  inexpen 
sive  markets  of  the  town,  makes  Baltimore  a  cheap  place 
in  which  to  live.  The  proximity  of  her  parks  and  the 
democracy  of  her  boulevards  makes  her  a  very  com 
fortable  place  of  residence  —  even  for  a  poor  man.  And 
you  may  live  within  your  little  house  and  of  a  summer 
evening  sit  upon  your  "  pleasure  porch  "  as  comfortably 
as  any  prince. 

In  Baltimore  it  is  always  a  "  pleasure  porch,"  thus 
proclaiming  her  as  a  real  gateway  to  the  old  South  —  the 
South  of  flavor  and  of  romance.  In  Baltimore,  you  al 
ways  say  "  Baltimore  City,"  probably  in  distinction  to 
Baltimore  county,  which  surrounds  it,  and  your  real  Bal- 
timorean  delights  to  speak  of  his  morning  journal  as 
"  that  Sun  paper."  The  town  clings  conservatively  to 
its  old  tricks  of  speech,  and  if  you  pick  up  that  news 
paper  you  will  perhaps  find  the  advertisement  of  an  auc 
tioneer  preparing  to  sell  the  effects  of  some  family  "  de 
clining  housekeeping." 

That  same  fine  conservatism  is  reflected  in  her  nomen 
clature  —  first  as  you  see  it  upon  the  shop  signs  and  the 
door-plates.  She  has  not  felt  the  flood  of  foreign  in 
vasion  as  some  of  our  other  cities  have  felt  it.  She  is 
not  cosmopolitan  —  and  she  is  proud  of  that.  And  the 
names  that  one  sees  along  her  streets  are  for  the  most 
part  the  good  names  of  English  lineage.  Even  the  names 
of  the  streets  themselves  are  proof  of  that  —  Alpaca  and 
April  alleys,  Apple,  and  Apricot  courts,  Crab  court,  Cuba 
street,  China  street  —  which  takes  one  back  to  the  days 
of  the  famous  clipper  ships  which  sailed  from  the 
wharves  of  Baltimore  —  Featherbed  lane,  Johnny-cake 


BALTIMORE  107 

road,  Maidenchoice  lane,  Pen  Lucy  avenue,  Sarah  Ann 
street  —  who  shall  say  that  conservatism  does  not  linger 
in  these  cognomens?  And  what  shall  one  say  of  con 
servatism  and  Baltimore's  devotion  to  Charles  street, 
sending  that  famous  thoroughfare  up  through  the  county 
to  the  north  as  Charles  Street  avenue  and  then  as  Charles 
Street  Avenue  extension? 

Do  not  mistake  Baltimore  conservatism  for  a  lack  of 
progress.  You  can  hardly  make  greater  mistake.  For 
Baltimore  today  is  constantly  planning  to  better  her  har 
bor,  to  improve  the  beginning  that  she  has  already  made 
in  the  establishment  of  municipal  docks  —  her  jealousy 
of  a  certain  Virginia  harbor  far  to  the  south  is  working 
much  good  to  herself.  She  is  constantly  bettering  her 
markets  —  today  they  are  not  only  among  the  most  won 
derful  but  the  most  efficient  in  the  whole  land.  And  to 
day  she  is  planning  a  great  common  terminal  for  freight 
right  within  her  heart  —  a  sizable  enterprise  to  be  erected 
at  a  cost  of  some  ten  millions  of  dollars.  For  she  is  de 
termined  that  her  reputation  for  giving  good  living  to 
her  citizens  and  at  a  low  cost  shall  be  maintained.  She 
realizes  that  much  of  that  cost  is  the  cost  of  food  dis 
tribution,  and  while  almost  every  other  city  in  the  land 
is  floundering  and  experimenting  she  is  going  straight 
ahead  —  with  definite  progress  in  view.  Such  purpose 
and  such  plans  make  first-rate  aids  to  conservatism. 

"  Baltimore  can  prove  to  any  one  who  will  give  her 
half  a  chance,  what  a  good,  a  dignified,  a  charming  thing 
it  is  to  be  an  American  town,"  writes  one  man  of  her. 
He  knows  her  well  and  he  does  not  go  by  the  mark. 
Baltimore  is  good,  is  dignified,  is  altogether  charming. 
And  she  is  an  American  town  of  the  very  first  rank. 


THE  AMERICAN  MECCA 

JUST  as  all  the  roads  of  old  Italy  led  to  Rome  so  do 
all  the  roads  of  this  broad  republic  lead  to  Washing 
ton —  its  seat  of  government.  At  every  season  of  the 
year  travelers  are  bound  to  it.  It  is  in  the  spring-time, 
however,  that  this  travel  begins  to  assume  the  propor 
tions  of  the  hegira.  It  is  a  patriotic  trek  —  essentially. 
And  the  slogan  "  Every  true  American  should  see  Wash 
ington  at  least  once  "  has  been  changed  by  shrewd  rail 
road  agents  and  hotel-keepers  to  "  Every  true  American 
should  see  Washington  once  a  year/'  although  some  of 
the  true  Americans  after  one  experience  with  Washing 
ton  hotel-keepers  are  apt  to  say  that  once  in  a  life-time 
is  quite  enough.  But  the  national  capital  is  worth  all 
the  hardships,  all  the  extortions  large  and  small.  It  is 
a  patriotic  shrine  and,  quite  incidentally,  the  most  beau 
tiful  city  in  America,  if  not  the  world,  and  so  it  is  that 
there  is  not  a  month  in  the  year  that  Americans  are  not 
pouring  through  its  gateway  —  the  wonderful  new  Union 
station. 

That  terminal  still  opens  the  eyes  of  those  folk  who 
come  trooping  down  toward  the  Potomac  —  old  fellows 
who  still  remember  the  last  time  they  went  to  Washing 
ton  and  the  entire  country  was  a-bristle  with  military 
camps  and  bristling  guns,  little  shavers  entering  for  the 
first  time  the  City  of  Perpetual  Delights,  lovelorn  bridal 
couples,  excursions  from  Ohio,  round-trips  from  off  back 
in  the  Blue  Ridge  mountains,  parties  from  up  in  Penn 
sylvania  —  the  broad  concourse  of  the  railroad  station  at 

108 


WASHINGTON  109 

Washington  is  a  veritable  parade-ground  of  latent  and 
varied  Americanism. 

The  members  of  a  self-appointed  Reception  Committee 
are  waiting  for  the  tourists  —  just  outside  the  marble 
portals  of  the  station.  Some  of  them  are  hotel-runners, 
others  are  cab-drivers,  but  they  are  all  there  and  their 
eyes  are  seemingly  unerring.  How  quickly  they  detect 
the  stranger  who  has  heard  the  "  true  American  "  slogan 
for  the  first  time,  and  who  has  the  return  part  of  his  ten- 
day  limit  ticket  tucked  safely  away  in  his  shabby  old  wal 
let. 

"  Seein'  Washington !  A  brilliant  trip  of  two  hours 
through  the  homes  of  wealth  an'  fashion,  with  a  lecture 
explainin'  every  point  of  interest  an'  fame." 

Here  is  the  first  welcoming  cry  of  the  Reception  Com 
mittee  —  and  seasoned  tourist  that  you  are,  you  do  not 
yield  to  it.  You  shake  your  head  in  a  determined  "  no  " 
to  the  barker  at  the  station  but  a  little  while  later  over  in 
Pennsylvania  avenue  you  succumb.  Two  dashing  young 
black-haired  ladies  —  slender  symphonies  in  white  —  are 
sitting  high  upon  one  of  the  large  travel- stained  peripa 
tetic  grandstands.  On  another  sight-seeing  automobile 
over  across  the  street  are  two  very  blondes  —  in  black. 
You  cast  your  fate  upon  the  ladies  with  the  black  hair 
and  the  white  dresses  and  climb  upon  the  .wagon  with 
them.  At  intervals  you  look  enviously  upon  mere 
passers-by.  Then  the  intervals  cease.  Two  young  men 
climb  upon  the  wagon  and  boldly  engage  themselves  in 
conversation  with  the  young  ladies.  At  the  very  moment 
when  you  are  about  to  interfere  in  the  name  of  propriety, 
you  discover  that  the  young  ladies  seem  to  like  it.  At 
any  rate  you  decide  it  will  be  interesting  to  listen  to 
their  conversation  and  the  important  young  man  who 
is  in  charge  of  the  grandstand  has  taken  your  non-re 
fundable  dollar  for  the  trip.  Otherwise  you  might  still 
change  in  favor  of  the  blondes  who  are  sitting  huddled 


i  io     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

under  a  single  green  sunshade  and  who  look  bored  with 
themselves. 

You  sit  ...  and  sit  ...  and  sit.  An  old  lady  finds 
her  cumbersome  way  up  on  the  front  seat  and  fumbles 
for  her  dollar.  A  deaf  gentleman  perches  himself  upon 
the  rear  bench.  After  which  you  sit  some  more.  Three 
or  four  more  true  Americans  find  their  way  upon  the 
wagon.  You  still  sit.  An  elderly  couple  crowds  in  upon 
your  bench.  The  man  has  whiskers  like  Uncle  Joe  Can 
non  or  a  cartoon,  but  his  wife  seems  to  have  subdued  him, 
after  all  these  years.  The  sitting  continues.  Finally, 
when  patience  is  all  but  exhausted,  the  personal  conduc 
tor  of  the  car  shouts  "  All  aboard  "  and  the  two  young 
ladies  in  white  duck  drop  off  nimbly.  For  a  moment 
their  acquaintances  seem  non-plussed.  Then  they  under 
stand,  for  they,  too,  jump  off  and  follow  after. 

The  chauffeur  fumbles  with  the  crank  of  the  top-heavy 
car.  It  does  not  respond  readily.  The  chauffeur  per 
spires  and  the  personal  conductor  —  who  will  shortly 
emerge  in  the  role  of  lecturer  —  offers  advice.  The 
chauffeur  softly  profanes.  Interested  spectators  gather 
about  and  begin  to  make  comments  of  a  personal  nature. 
Finally,  when  the  chauffeur  is  about  to  give  it  all  up  and 
you  and  yours  are  to  be  plunged  into  mortification  — 
you  can  safely  suspect  those  young  blondes  on  the  rival 
enterprise  across  the  way  of  laughing  in  their  tight  little 
sleeves  at  you  —  the  engine  begins  to  snort  violently  and 
throb  industriously.  The  chauffeur  wipes  the  perspira 
tion  from  his  brow  with  the  back  of  his  hand  and  smiles 
triumphantly  at  the  scoffers  across  the  street. 

He  jumps  into  his  seat  briskly,  as  if  afraid  that  the  car 
might  change  its  mind,  and  you  are  off.  The  ship's  com 
pany  settles  into  various  stages  of  contentment.  Seem' 
Washington  at  last.  .  .  .  The  lecturer  reaches  for  his 
megaphone. 

But  not  so  fast  —  this  is  Washington. 


WASHINGTON  in 

The  real  start  has  not  yet  begun.  All  these  are  but 
preliminaries  to  the  start  of  the  real  start.  You  are  not 
going  to  bump  into  the  world  of  wealth  and  fashion  as 
quickly  as  all  this.  You  go  along  Pennsylvania  avenue 
for  another  two  squares  and  for  twenty  minutes  more 
traffic  is  solicited.  The  novelty  wears  off  and  content 
ment  ceases. 

"  I  don't  purpose  to  pay  a  dollar  for  a  ride  and  spend 
the  hull  time  settin'  'round  like  a  public  hack  in  front  of 
th'  hotels,"  says  a  bald-headed  man  and  he  voices  a  rising 
sentiment.  He  is  from  Baltimore  and  he  is  frankly 
skeptical  of  all  things  in  Washington.  The  lecturer  and 
the  chauffeur  confer.  The  performance  with  the  engine 
crank  is  given  once  again  and  you  finally  make  a  real 
start. 

Entertainment  begins  from  that  start.  But  you  get 
history  as  a  preliminary  to  wealth  and  fashion,  for  it 
so  happens  that  wealth  and  fashion  do  not  dwell  in  that 
part  of  Pennsylvania  avenue. 

"  Site  of  first  p'lice  station  in  Washington,"  the  young 
man  rattles  out  through  his  megaphone.  "  Oldest  hotel 
in  Washington.  Washington's  Chinatown.  Peace  Mon 
ument.  Monument  to  Albert  Pike,  Gran'  Master  of  the 
Southern  Masons ;  only  Confederate  monument  in  the 
city.  Home  o'  Fightin'  Bob  Evans,  there  with  the  tree 
against  the  window.  His  house  was  — " 

"  What  was  that  about  the  Confederates  ? "  the  deaf 
man  interrupts  from  the  back  seat.  The  lecturer,  with 
an  expression  of  utter  boredom,  repeats.  At  this  mo 
ment  the  chauffeur  comes  into  the  limelight.  He  recog 
nizes  a  girl  friend  on  the  sidewalk  and  in  the  enthusiasm 
of  that  recognition  nearly  bumps  the  grandstand  into  a 
load  of  brick.  When  order  is  restored  and  you  go  for 
ward  in  a  straight  course  once  again,  the  lecturer  re 
sumes  — 

"  On  our  right  the  United  States  Pension  Office,  the 


PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

largest  brick  buildin'  in  the  world  and  famed  for  the  in 
augural  balls  it  has  every  four  years  —  only  it  didn't  have 
one  las'  time.  But  when  Mr.  Taft  was  inaugurated 
nine  thousand  couples  were  a-waltzin'  an — " 

Some  of  the  folk  upon  the  car  look  shocked.  They 
come  from  communities  where  dancing  is  taboo,  and  the 
lecturer  seems  to  hint  at  an  orgy  there  in  one  of  the  tax 
payer's  buildings. 

"  There  is  also  the  largest  frieze  in  the  world  'round 
that  building,"  he  continues,  "  an'  it  ain't  the  North  Pole, 
either.  Eighteen  hundred  soldiers  and  sailors  —  count 
'em  some  day  —  marchin'  there,  the  sick  an'  the  wounded 
laggin'  behind,  the  trail  of  martyr's  blood  markin'  their 
path,  comrade  helpin'  comrade  —  all  a-bringin'  honor  an* 
glory  to  the  flag." 

He  drops  the  megaphone  to  catch  his  breath  and 
whispers  into  your  ear.  He  realizes  that  you  have  under 
stood  him  —  and  half  apologizes  for  himself : 

"  They  like  that,"  he  explains,  in  an  undertone.  "  A 
little  oratory  now  an'  then  tickles  'em.  An'  then  they 
like  this : " 

The  megaphone  goes  into  action. 

"  We  are  travelin'  west  in  F  street,  the  Wall  street  of 
Washington,  the  place  of  the  banker  an'  broker." 

"  Ain't  we  goin'  to  see  the  houses  of  the  fashionable 
people  ? "  demands  the  wife  of  the  bald-headed  Balti- 
morean.  "  Now  over  in  our  city  Eutaw  place  is  — " 

"  We  are  comin'  there,  madam,"  says  the  lecturer, 
courteously. 

And  in  a  little  while  you  do  come  there.  You  sit  back 
complacently  in  your  seat  and  smack  your  mental  lips 
at  the  sight  of  the  mansion  of  the  man  who  owns  three 
banks ;  of  that  of  him  who,  the  lecturer  solemnly  affirms, 
is  the  president  of  the  Whiskey  Trust ;  at  a  third  where 
dwells  "  the  richest  minister  of  the  United  States."  A 
little  school-teacher,  who  has  come  down  from  Hartford. 


WASHINGTON  113 

Conn.,  makes  profuse  notes  in  a  neat  leather-covered 
book.  It  is  plain  to  see  that  she  takes  the  duty  of  the 
true  Americans  as  a  serious  enterprise,  indeed. 

You  all  start  and  look  when  ex-Speaker  Cannon's 
house  is  passed,  and  you  catch  a  glimpse  of  the  old  man 
coming  down  the  door-steps.  The  public  interest  in  him 
has  not  seemed  to  cease  with  his  retirement  from  the 
center  of  the  national  arena.  But  it  has  lessened.  You 
realize  that  a  moment  later  when  your  peregrinating 
grandstand  rolls  by  a  solemn-faced  man  walking  down 
the  street  —  a  big  man  in  a  black  suit,  his  face  hidden  by 
a  black  slouch  hat. 

"  Mr.  Bryan,"  whispers  the  lecturer,  this  time  with 
out  the  megaphone. 

It  is  quite  unnecessary.  For  a  brief  instant  Washing 
ton  is  forgotten.  In  that  instant  the  crowd  regards  the 
second  or  third  best-known  man  in  America  —  silently 
and  curiously.  The  lecturer  brings  them  back  to  their 
dollar's  worth.  He  boldly  points  out  the  Larz  Anderson 
house  as  the  home  of  "  the  richest  real  estate  man  in  the 
country,"  the  new  home  of  Perry  Belmont  as  having 
"  three  stories  above  ground  and  three  below  " —  an  ex 
cursionist  from  Reading,  Pa.,  interrupts  to  ask  how  much 
coal  they  will  need  to  fill  such  a  cellar  —  you  see  the  home 
of  the  late  Mr.  Walsh  with  "  a  forty-five  hundred  dollar 
marble  bench  in  the  yard,  all  cut  out  of  a  single  piece/' 
the  sedate  and  stately  house  of  GifTord  Pinchot. 

It  is  pleasant,  driving  through  these  smooth  Washing 
ton  streets,  even  if  the  low-hanging  tree  branches  do 
make  you  jump  and  start  at  times.  You  go  up  this 
street,  down  that,  past  long  rows  of  neat  Colonial  houses 
that  some  day  are  going  to  look  neat  and  old  —  turn  by 
one  of  the  lovely  open  squares  of  the  city.  They  have 
just  erected  a  statue  there  —  grandstands  are  already 
going  up  around  about  it  and  there  will  be  speeches  and 
oratory  before  long. 


H4     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Washington  is  constantly  in  the  throes  of  an  epidemic 
of  dedications.  There  are  now  more  statues  in  the  city 
than  Mr.  Baedeker  ever  can  tally  and  each  of  them  has 
undergone  dedication —  at  least  once.  The  President 
has  been  corralled,  if  possible,  although  Mr.  Wilson  has 
already  shown  a  reticence  for  this  sort  of  thing.  If  the 
President  simply  will  not  come,  a  Governor  or  a  rather 
famous  Senator  will  do  as  well.  And  in  the  far  pinch 
there  are  many  Representatives  in  Washington  who  are 
mighty  good  orators.  You  can  almost  get  a  Representa 
tive  at  the  crook  of  your  finger,  and  you  cannot  have  a 
real  dedication  without  a  splurry  of  oratory.  It  is  al 
most  as  necessary  as  music  —  or  the  refreshments. 

As  you  slip  by  one  of  those  statues  — "  the  equestrian 
figure  of  General  Andrew  Jackson  on  horseback  " — the 
gentleman  from  Reading  demands  that  the  car  stop.  He 
wants  to  ask  a  question  and  apparently  he  cannot  ask  a 
question  and  be  in  motion  at  the  same  time.  So  he  de 
mands  that  the  car  be  stopped.  It  is  one  of  the  privileges 
of  a  man  who  has  paid  a  perfectly  good  dollar  for  the 
trip.  The  car  stops  —  abruptly. 

You  will  probably  recall  that  Jackson  statue,  standing 
in  the  center  of  Lafayette  square  and  directly  in  front 
of  the  White  House.  Perhaps  General  Jackson  rode  a 
horse  that  way  and  perhaps  he  did  not,  but  there  the 
doughty  old  warrior  sits,  his  bronze  mount  plunging  high 
upon  hind  legs. 

"  What  is  ever  going  to  keep  that  statue  from  falling 
over  some  day  ?  "  demands  the  man  from  Reading.  He 
has  a  keen  professional  interest  in  the  matter,  for  he  has 
been  a  blacksmith  up  in  that  brisk  Pennsylvania  town 
for  many  a  year. 

The  lecturer  explains  that  the  tail  of  the  bronze  horse 
is  heavily  weighted  and  that  the  whole  figure  is  held  in 
balance  that  way.  But  the  blacksmith  is  Pennsylvania 
Dutch  —  of  the  sort  not  to  be  convinced  in  an  instant  — 


Through   the  portals  of  this"  Union  Station  come  all  the, 
visitors  to    Washington 


WASHINGTON  115 

and  he  sets  forth  his  opinion  of  the  danger  at  length,  to 
the  bald-headed  man  from  Baltimore,  who  sits  just  be 
hind  him. 

The  lecturer  goes  forward  once  again.  You  look  at  the 
proud  old  mansion  that  faces  Lafayette  square,  and  gasp 
when  the  intelligent  young  man  with  the  megaphone  tells 
you  that  it  was  given  to  Daniel  Webster  by  the  American 
people  and  that  he  gambled  it  away.  You  notice  the 
house  that  Admiral  Dewey  got  from  the  same  source, 
and  wonder  if  he  could  not  have  contrived  possibly  to 
gamble  it  away.  You  nose  St.  John's  church  — "  the 
Church  of  State,"  the  young  man  calls  it  —  and  turn 
into  Sixteenth  street.  But  alas,  it  is  Sixteenth  street  no 
longer.  Through  a  bit  of  the  official  snobbery  that  fre 
quently  comes  to  the  surface  in  the  governing  of  the  na 
tional  capital  that  fine  highway  has  been  named  "  the 
Avenue  of  the  Presidents,"  a  name  that  is  so  out  of  har 
mony  of  our  fine  American  town  that  it  will  probably 
be  changed  in  the  not  distant  future. 

The  lecturer  points  your  attention  to  another  house. 

"  The  Dolly  Madison  Hotel,  for  women  only/'  he  an 
nounces.  "  No  men  or  dogs  allowed  above  the  first  floor. 
The  only  male  thing  around  the  premises  is  the  mail-box 
and  it  is  — " 

He  has  gone  too  far.  You  fix  your  steely  glance  of 
disapproval  upon  him  and  he  withers.  He  drops  his 
megaphone  and  whispers  into  your  ear  once  again: 

"  I  hate  to  do  it,"  he  apologizes,  "  but  I  have  to.  The 
boss  says :  — '  Give  'em  wit  an'  humor,  Harry,  or  back 
you  goes  to  your  old  job  on  a  Fourteenth  street  car.' 
Think  of  givin'  that  bunch  wit  an'  humor!  Look  at 
that  old  sobersides  next  to  you,  still  a-worryin'  about  that 
statue !  " 

Wit  and  humor  it  is  then.  Wit  and  humor  and  wealth 
and  fashion.  It  almost  seems  too  little  to  offer  a  mere 


n6     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

dollar  for  such  joys.  You  make  the  turn  around  the 
drive  in  back  of  the  White  House  and  you  miss  the 
Taft  cow  —  which  in  other  days  was  wont  to  feast  upon 
the  greensward.  You  ask  the  lecturer  what  became  of 
Mr.  Taft's  cow. 

"  She  was  deceased,"  he  solemnly  explained,  "  a  year 
before  his  term  was  up  —  of  the  colic." 

And  of  that  somewhat  ambiguous  statement  you  can 
make  your  own  translation. 

The  sight-seeing  car  stops  at  the  little  group  of  hotels 
in  Pennsylvania  avenue,  near  the  site  of  the  old  Balti 
more  &  Potomac  railroad  station.  The  lecturer  begins 
to  use  his  megaphone  to  expatiate  upon  the  advantages 
of  a  trip  to  Arlington  which  is  about  to  begin,  but  Ar 
lington  is  too  sweetly  serious  a  memorial  to  be  explored 
by  a  humorous  motor-car.  And  —  in  the  offing  —  you 
are  seeing  something  else.  Another  car  of  the  line  upon 
which  you  have  been  voyaging  is  moored  at  the  very 
point  from  which  you  started,  not  quite  two  hours  ago. 
Upon  that  car  sit  the  same  two  young  black-haired  ladies. 
Two  young  men  are  climbing  up  to  sit  beside  them. 
Your  gaze  wanders.  On  the  rival  car  across  the  way  the 
two  very  blondes  in  black  are  still  holding  giggling  con 
versation.  Your  suspicions  are  roused. 

Do  they  ever  ride? 

Apparently  not.  Tomorrow  they  will  be  upon  the  cars 
again,  the  blondes  upon  the  right,  the  brunettes  upon  the 
left.  And  the  day  after  tomorrow  they  will  sit  and  wait 
and  appear  interested  and  in  joyous  anticipation.  And 
if  it  rains  upon  the  following  day  they  will  don  their 
little  mackintoshes  and  talk  pleasantly  about  its  being 
nearly  time  to  clear  up. 

Now  you  know.  Seein'  Washington  employs  cappers. 
Those  young  ladies  sit  there  to  induce  dollars  —  faith, 


WASHINGTON  117 

'tis  seduction,  pure  and  simple  —  from  narrow  masculine 
pockets.     You  do  know,  now. 

If  we  are  giving  much  space  to  the  tourist  view  of 
Washington  it  is  because  the  tourist  plays  so  important 
a  part  in  the  life  of  the  town.  He  is  one  of  its  chief  as 
sets  and,  seriously  speaking,  there  is  something  rather 
pathetic  in  the  joy  that  comes  to  the  faces  of  those  who 
step  out  from  the  great  portals  of  the  new  station  for 
the  very  first  time.  There  is  something  in  their  very 
expressions  that  seems  to  express  long  seasons  of  saving 
and  of  scrimping,  perhaps  of  downright  deprivation  in 
order  that  our  great  American  mecca  may  finally  be 
reached.  You  will  see  the  same  expressions  upon  the 
faces  of  the  humbler  folk  who  go  to  visit  any  of  the 
great  expositions  that  periodically  are  held  across  the 
land. 

That  expression  of  eminent  satisfaction  —  for  who 
could  fail  to  see  Washington  for  the  first  time  and  not  be 
eminently  satisfied  —  reaches  its  climax  each  week-day 
afternoon  in  the  East  Room  of  the  White  House.  If 
President  Wilson  has  reached  a  finer  determination  than 
his  determination  to  let  the  folk  of  his  nation-wide  fam 
ily  come  and  see  him,  we  have  yet  to  hear  of  it.  And 
there  is  not  a  man  or  woman  in  the  land  who  should  be 
above  attending  the  simple  official  reception  that  the  Pres 
ident  gives  each  afternoon  at  his  house  to  all  who  may 
care  to  come. - 

There  is  little  red-tape  about  the  arrangements  in  ad 
vance.  The  tendency  to  hedge  the  President  around  with 
restrictions  has  been  completely  offset  in  the  present  ad 
ministration.  A  note  or  a  hurried  call  upon  the  Presi 
dent's  secretary  in  advance  —  a  card  of  invitation  is 
quickly  forthcoming.  And  at  half-past  two  o'clock  of 
any  ordinary  afternoon  you  present  yourself  at  the  east 


ii8     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

wing  of  the  White  House.  Your  card  is  quickly  scruti 
nized  and  you  may  be  sure  of  it  that  the  sharp-eyed 
Irishman  who  is  more  than  policeman  but  rather  a  men 
tor  at  the  gate,  has  scrutinized  you,  too.  His  judgment 
is  quick,  rarely  erring.  And  unless  you  meet  his  entire 
approval,  you  are  not  going  to  enter  the  President's 
house.  But  he  has  approved  and  before  you  know  it  you 
—  there  are  several  hundred  of  you  —  are  slipping  for 
ward  in  a  march  into  the  basement  of  the  Executive 
Mansion  and  up  one  of  its  broad  stairs.  There  are  nu 
merous  attendants  along  the  path. 

"  Single  file !  "  shouts  one  of  them  and  single  file  you 
all  go  —  just  as  you  used  to  play  Indian  or  follow-your- 
leader  in  long-ago  days.  And  you  all  step  from  the 
stair-head  into  the  East  Room,  while  the  women-folk 
among  you  conjure  imagination  to  their  aid  and  endeavor 
to  see  that  lovely  apartment  dressed  for  a  great  reception 
or,  best  of  all,  one  of  the  infrequent  White  House  wed 
dings. 

Other  attendants  quickly  and  easily  form  you  into  a 
great  crescent,  two  or  three  human  files  in  width  and  ex 
tending  in  a  great  sweep  from  a  vast  pair  of  closed  doors 
which  give  to  the  living  portion  of  the  house.  No  one 
speaks,  but  every  one  takes  stock  of  his  neighbors.  If 
it  is  in  vacation  season  there  are  many  boys  and  girls  — 
for  whole  schools  make  the  Washington  expedition  in 
these  days  —  there  may  be  several  Indians  in  war-paint 
and  feather  making  ceremonious  visit  to  the  Great  White 
Brother.  If  you  are  traveled  you  will  probably  see 
New  England  or  Carolina  or  Kansas  or  California  in 
these  folk,  whose  hearts  are  quickened  in  anticipation. 

Suddenly  —  the  great  door  opens,  just  a  little.  A  thin, 
wiry  man  in  gray  steps  into  the  room  and  takes  his  posi 
tion  near  the  head  of  the  crescent.  An  aide  in  undress 
military  uniform  stands  close  to  him,  two  sharp-faced 
young  men  stand  a  little  to  the  left  of  them  and  act  as  a 


WASHINGTON  119 

human  Scylla  and  Charybdis  through  which  all  must  pass. 
There  are  no  preliminaries  —  no  hint  of  ceremony. 
Within  five  seconds  of  the  time  when  the  President  has 
taken  his  place,  the  line  begins  to  move  forward.  In 
twenty  minutes  he  has  shaken  hands  with  three  or  four 
hundred  people  and  the  reception  is  over.  But  in  the 
brief  fraction  of  a  single  minute  when  your  hand  has 
grasped  that  of  the  President  you  feel  that  he  knows  no 
one  else  on  earth.  He  concentrates  upon  you  and  that, 
in  itself,  is  a  gift  of  which  any  statesman  may  well  be 
proud.  And  while  you  are  thinking  of  the  pleasure  that 
his  word  or  two  of  greeting  has  given  you,  you  awake  to 
find  yourself  out  of  the  room  and  hunting  for  your  um 
brella  at  the  check-stand  in  the  lower  hall.  The  pleasant 
personal  feeling  is  with  you  even  after  you  have  left 
the  shelter  of  the  White  House  roof.  It  is  showering 
gently  and  a  man  under  a  tree  is  murmuring  something 
about  Secretary  Bryan  seeing  visitors  at  a  quarter  to 
five  but  neither  makes  impress  upon  you.  You  are 
merely  thinking  how  much  easier  it  is  to  come  to  see  the 
President  of  the  greatest  republic  in  the  world  than  many 
a  lesser  man  within  it  —  railroad  heads,  bankers,  even 
petty  politicians. 

In  other  days  it  was  not  as  easy  to  gain  admittance  to 
the  President,  but  the  tourist  who  was  not  above  guile 
could  be  photographed  shaking  hands  with  the  great  per 
son.  A  place  on  that  always  alluring  Pennsylvania  ave 
nue  did  the  trick.  You  stepped  in  a  canvas  screen  into 
the  place  of  the  enlarged  image  of  a  sailor  who  was  once 
snapped  shaking  hands  with  President  Taft.  When  the 
picture  was  finished  you  were  where  the  sailor  had  been, 
and  you  had  a  post-card  that  would  make  the  folks  back 
home  take  notice.  True  you  were  a  little  more  prominent 
in  it  than  the  President,  but  then  Mr.  Taft  was  not  pay 
ing  for  the  picture.  In  fact  Mr.  Taft,  when  he  heard  of 
the  practice,  grew  extremely  annoyed  and  had  it  stopped, 


120     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

so  ending  abruptly  one  of  the  tourist  joys  of  Wash 
ington. 

After  the  White  House,  the  Capitol  is  an  endless  source 
of  delight  to  those  who  have  come  to  Washington  from 
afar.  A  little  squad  of  aged  men,  who  have  a  wolfish 
scent  for  tourists,  act  as  its  own  particular  Reception 
Committee.  These  old  men,  between  their  cards  and  the 
sporting  extras  of  the  evening  papers,  condescend  to  act 
as  guides  to  the  huge  building.  We  shall  spare  you  the 
details  of  a  trip  through  it  with  them.  It  is  enough  to 
say  that  they  are,  in  the  spirit  at  least,  sight-seeing  car 
lecturers  grown  into  another  generation.  Their  quar 
rels  with  the  Capitol  police  are  endless.  On  one  memor 
able  occasion,  a  captain  of  that  really  efficient  police-force 
had  decided  to  mark  the  famous  whispering  stone  in 
the  old  Hall  of  Representatives  with  a  bit  of  paint. 
You  can  read  about  that  whispering  stone  in  any  of  the 
tourist-guides  which  the  train-boy  sells  you  on  your  way 
to  Washington.  Suffice  it  now  to  say  that  when  you  have 
found  this  phonetic  marvel  and  have  stood  upon  it  your 
whisper  will  be  heard  distinctly  in  a  certain  far  corner 
of  the  gallery  of  the  room.  It  is  an  acoustic  freak  of 
which  the  schoolboys  out  in  Racine  can  tell  you  better 
than  I.  And  it  is  one  of  the  prized  assets  of  the  Capitol 
guides.  The  police  captain  forgot  that  when  he  set  out 
to  mark  it. 

It  came  back  to  him  the  evening  of  that  day,  however, 
when  the  building  had  been  cleared.  He  chanced  to  cross 
the  old  hall  and,  looking  for  his  marker,  found  three  of 
the  guides  upon  their  knees  carefully  restoring  it 
to  absolute  uniformity  with  its  neighbors.  And  the 
captain  nearly  lost  his  job.  He  had  sought  to  interfere 
with  prerogative,  and  prerogative  is  a  particularly  sacred 
thing  at  the  Federal  capital  —  as  we  shall  see  in  a  little 
while. 


WASHINGTON  121 

Late  in  a  pleasant  afternoon  all  Washington  seems  to 
walk  in  F  street.  The  little  girls  come  out  of  the 
matinees,  the  bigger  girls  drift  out  from  the  tea-rooms, 
there  is  a  swirl  of  motor  vehicles  —  gasoline  and  electric 

—  but  the  tourist  knows  not  of  all  this.     The  gay  flam- 
meries    of    Pennsylvania    avenue    hold    him    fascinated. 
Souvenir  shops  rivet  him  to  their  counters.     Post-cards 

—  grave,  humorous,  abominable  —  urge  themselves  upon 
him.     But  if  all  these  fail  —  they  have  post-cards  now 
adays  of  the  high  schools  in  each  of  the  little  Arizona 
towns  —  here  upon  a  counter  are  the  little  statuettes  of 
pre-digested  currency. 

Mr.  Lincoln  in  $10,000  of  greenbacks.  And  yet  that 
money  today  could  not  buy  one  drop  of  gasoline,  let 
alone  an  imported  touring  automobile,  for  once  it  has 
passed  through  the  government's  macerating  machine  it 
is  only  fit  for  the  sculptor.  Three  thousand  dollars  go 
into  a  Benjamin  Harrison  hat,  fifteen  thousand  into  a 
model  of  the  Washington  Monument  that  looks  as  if  it 
were  about  to  melt  beneath  a  summer  sun.  Twenty 
thousand  doll  —  stay,  there  is  a  limit  to  credulity.  And 
you  refuse  to  buy  without  a  signed  certificate  from  the 
Treasury  Department  as  to  these  valuations. 

Most  of  the  tourists  do  buy,  however.  They  seem  to 
be  blindly  credulous  —  these  folk  who  feel  their  way  to 
Washington.  It  was  not  so  very  many  spring-times  ago 
that  a  rumor  worked  afloat  of  a  dull  Sabbath  to  the  ef 
fect  that  the  Washington  Monument  was  about  to  fall. 
That  rumor  slipped  around  the  town  with  amazing 
rapidity  —  Washington  is  hardly  more  than  a  gossipy, 
rumor-filled  village  after  all.  Two  or  three  thousand 
folk  went  down  to  the  Mall  to  be  present  at  the  fall.  No 
two  of  them  could  agree  as  to  the  direction  in  which  the 
shaft  would  tumble  and  they  all  made  a  long  and  cautious 
line  that  completely  encircled  it  —  at  a  safe  distance. 
After  long  hours  of  waiting  they  all  went  home.  Yet 


122     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

no  one  was  angry.     They  all  seemed  to  think  it  part  of 
the  day's  program. 

There  is  another  side  of  Washington  not  so  funny  and 
tourists,  even  of  the  most  sedate  sort,  who  stop  at  the 
large  hotels  and  who  ride  about  in  dignified  motor-cars, 
do  not  see  it.  It  is  the  side  of  heart-burnings.  For  in 
no  other  city  of  the  land  is  the  social  code  more  sharply 
defined  —  and  regulated.  There  are  many  cities  in  the 
country  and  we  are  telling  of  them  in  this  book,  who  draw 
deep  breaths  upon  exclusiveness.  But  in  none  of  these 
save  Washington  do  the  folk  who  do  obtain  flaunt  them 
selves  in  the  faces  of  those  who  do  not.  The  fine  old 
houses  of  Beacon  street,  in  Boston,  and  of  the  Battery 
down  at  Charleston  may  draw  themselves  apart,  but  they 
do  it  silently  and  unostentatiously.  In  the  very  nature 
of  things  in  Washington  much  modesty  is  quite  out  of  the 
question. 

For  here  at  our  Federal  capital  we  have  a  strange  mix 
ture  of  real  democracy  and  false  aristocracy  as  well  as 
real  —  if  there  be  any  such  thing  as  real  aristocracy. 
The  fact  that  almost  every  person  in  the  town  works, 
more  or  less  directly,  for  Uncle  Sam  makes  for  the  de 
mocracy.  And  that  self -same  fact  seems  to  fairly  estab 
lish  the  aristocracy  —  you  can  frankly  call  much  of  it 
snobbishness  —  of  the  place.  To  understand  the  whys 
and  wherefores  of  this  paradox  one  would  need,  himself, 
to  be  an  employe  of  the  government,  of  large  or  small  de 
gree.  They  are  many  and  they  are  complicated.  But  an 
illustration  or  two  will  suffice  to  show  what  we  mean : 

A  rule,  which  no  one  nowadays  seems  very  desirous  of 
fathering,  but  nevertheless  a  rule  of  long  standing,  states 
that  when  a  department  chief  enters  an  elevator  in  any  of 
the  department  buildings  it  must  carry  him  without  other 
stops  to  his  floor.  The  other  passengers  in  the  car  must 
wait  the  time  and  the  will  of  the  chief,  no  matter  how 


a 
a 
U 


WASHINGTON  123 

urgent  may  be  their  errands  or  how  short  the  time  at 
their  command.  A  gradual  increase  of  this  silly  rule  has 
made  it  include  many  assistants,  sub-chiefs  and  assistants 
to  sub-chiefs.  Only  the  elevator  man  knows  the  rank  at 
which  a  government  employe  becomes  entitled  to  this 
peculiar  privilege.  But  he  does  know,  and  woe  be  to 
that  little  stenographer  who  enters  the  Department  of 

X at  just  three  minutes  of  nine  in  the  morning,  with 

the  expectation  of  being  at  her  desk  with  that  prompt 
ness  which  the  Federal  government  demands  of  the  folk 
in  its  service.  The  second  assistant  to  a  second  assist 
ant  of  a  sub-chief  of  a  sub-division  may  have  entered. 
The  little  stenographer's  desk  is  upon  the  third  floor ;  the 
gentleman  whose  official  title  spelled  out  reaches  almost 
across  a  sheet  of  note  paper  is  upon  the  seventh.  There 
are  folk  within  the  crowded  elevator-car  for  the  fourth 
and  fifth  and  sixth  floors  as  well.  But  they  have  neither 
title  nor  rank  and  the  car  shoots  to  the  seventh  floor  for 
the  benefit  of  the  Mr.  Assistant  Somebody.  If  there  is 
another  Assistant  Somebody  there  to  ride  down  to  the 
ground  floor  —  and  there  frequently  is  —  you  can  im 
agine  the  consternation  of  the  clerks.  And  yet  it  is  part 
of  the  system  under  which  they  have  to  work  when  they 
work  for  that  most  democratic  of  employers  —  Uncle 
Samuel. 

The  secretary  of  an  important  department  who  entered 
the  cabinet  with  the  present  administration  stayed  very 
late  at  his  office  one  evening,  but  found  the  elevator  man 
awaiting  him  when  he  stepped  out  into  the  hallway  of 
the  deserted  building.  It  was  only  a  short  flight  of 
stairs  to  the  street,  and  the  secretary  —  it  was  Mr. 
Bryan  —  asked  the  man  why  he  had  not  gone  home. 

"  My  orders  are  to  stay  here,  sir,  until  the  secretary 
has  gone  home  for  the  night,"  was  the  reply. 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  say  that  right  there  was  one 
order  in  the  State  department  that  was  immediately  re- 


124     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

voked,  while  some  twenty  thousand  clerks  and  stenog 
raphers  who  form  the  working  staff  of  official  Washing 
ton  sent  up  little  prayers  of  thanksgiving.  These  clerks 
and  stenographers  make  up  the  every-day  fiber  of  the 
town  life.  They  go  to  work  in  the  morning  at  nine  — 
for  a  half-hour  before  that  time  you  can  see  human 
streams  of  them  pouring  toward  the  larger  departments 
—  and  they  quit  at  half  past  four.  The  closing  hour  used 
to  be  five,  but  the  clerks  decided  that  they  would  have  a 
shorter  lunch-time  and  so  they  moved  their  afternoon 
session  thirty  minutes  ahead.  Half  an  hour  is  a  short 
lunch-time  and  so  official  Washington  carries  its  lunch 
to  its  desk,  more  or  less  cleverly  disguised.  The  owners 
of  popular  priced  downtown  restaurants  have  long  since 
given  up  in  utter  disgust. 

But  official  Washington  does  not  care.  Official  Wash 
ington  ends  its  day  at  half-past  four  and  official  Wash 
ington  is  such  a  power  that  matinees,  afternoon  lectures 
and  concerts  of  any  popular  sort  are  rarely  planned  to 
begin  before  that  hour.  And  on  the  hot  summer  after 
noons  of  the  Federal  capital  the  wisdom  of  such  early 
closing  is  hardly  to  be  doubted.  On  such  afternoons, 
matinee  or  concert,  a  cup  of  tea  or  a  walk  along  the  shop 
windows  of  F  street  are  all  forgotten.  For  beyond  the 
heat  of  the  city,  within  easy  reach  by  its  really  wonder 
ful  transportation  system,  are  playgrounds  of  infinite 
variety  and  joy.  True  it  is  that  the  really  fine  parts  of 
Rock  Creek  Park  are  rather  rigidly  held  for  those  folk 
who  can  afford  to  ride  in  motor  cars,  but  there  is  the 
river,  innumerable  picnic-grounds  in  every  direction,  fine 
bathing  at  Chesapeake  beach,  not  far  distant  —  and  the 
canal. 

Of  all  these  the  old  Chesapeake  and  Ohio  canal  is  by 
far  the  most  distinctive.  And  how  the  Washington  folk 
do  love  that  old  waterway !  What  fun  they  do  have  out 
of  it  with  their  motor  boats  and  their  canoes.  If  that 


WASHINGTON  125 

old  water-highway,  almost  losing  its  path  in  the  stretches 
of  thick  wood  and  undergrowth,  had  been  created  as  a 
plaything  for  the  capital  city,  it  could  hardly  have  been 
better  devised.  The  motor  boats  and  the  canoes  set 
forth  from  Georgetown  —  on  holidays  and  Sundays  in 
great  droves.  They  go  all  the  way  up  to  Great  Falls  — 
and  even  beyond  —  working  their  passage  through  the 
old  locks,  exchanging  repartee  with  the  lock-tenders, 
loafing  under  the  shadows  of  the  trees,  drinking  in  the 
indolence  of  the  summer  days. 

But  Shafer's  Lock  or  Cabin  John's  Bridge  is  not  the 
Chevy  Chase  Club  and  official  Washington  knows  that. 
It  reads  in  the  daily  papers  of  that  other  life,  of  the 
folk  who  wear  white  flannels  and  dawdle  around  great 
porches  all  day  long ;  hears  rumors  brought,  Lord  knows 
how,  from  the  gossipy  Metropolitan  Club ;  almost  touches 
shoulders  with  its  smart  breakfasts  and  lunches  and  din 
ners  when  it  comes  in  and  out  of  the  confectioners'  and 
the  big  hotels.  But  it  is  none  the  less  apart,  hopelessly 
and  irrevocably  apart.  Uncle  Sam  may  take  the  office 
folk  of  his  capital  and  give  them  the  assurance  of  a  liveli 
hood  through  long  years,  but  that  is  all.  He  gives  them 
no  chance  to  step  out  of  the  comfortable  rut  into  which 
they  have  been  placed.  The  good  positions,  the  positions 
that  mean  rank  and  title  and  entrance  to  the  hallowed 
places,  rarely  come  through  promotions.  They  are  the 
gifts  of  fortune,  gifts  even  to  strange  folk  from  Cleveland 
or  Madison  or  Stockton.  They  are  not  the  reward  of 
faithful  service  at  an  unknown  desk. 

And  so  official  Washington,  as  we  have  seen  here,  is 
quite  helpless.  The  other  official  Washington  —  the  of 
ficial  Washington  of  the  society  columns  —  little  cares. 
It  is  not  above  noticing  the  twenty  thousand,  but  it  is 
mere  notice  and  nothing  more.  And  as  for  interest  or 
graciousness  or  kind-heartedness  —  they  are  quite  out  of 


126     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

the  question.  Washington  is  being  rebuilt,  in  both  its 
physical  and  its  social  structure.  The  architects  of  its  so 
cial  structure  are  not  less  capable  than  those  folk  who  are 
working  out  marvels  in  steel  and  marble.  These  first 
see  the  Washington  of  tomorrow,  modeled  closely  after 
the  structures  of  European  capitals.  Already  our  newly 
created  class  of  American  idle  rich  is  establishing  its 
habitat  along  the  lovely  streets  of  our  handsomest  town. 
That  is  a  beginning.  In  some  of  the  departments  they 
have  begun  to  serve  tea  at  four  of  an  afternoon  —  just 
as  they  do  on  the  terrace  of  the  House  of  Commons. 
That  is  another  beginning.  We  are  starting. 

The  structure  of  European  capitals  is  largely  built  upon 
class  distinctions.  Washington  is  being  builded  close  to 
its  models. 

For  ourselves,  we  prefer  the  touches  of  Europe  as  the 
architects  work  them  in  steel  and  in  marble.  A  man  who 
has  been  to  Washington  and  who  has  not  returned  within 
the  decade  will  be  astonished  to  see  the  change  already 
worked  in  its  appearance.  From  the  moment  he  steps 
across  the  threshold  of  the  fine  new  station  —  itself  a 
revelation  after  the  old-time  railroad  terminals  of  the 
town  —  he  will  see  transformation.  Washington  is  still 
in  growth.  They  are  tearing  down  the  ugly  buildings 
and  building  upon  their  sites  the  beautiful,  weaving  in 
the  almost  gentle  creations  of  the  modern  architects,  a 
new  city  which  after  a  little  time  will  cease  to  be  modeled 
upon  Europe  but  which  will  serve,  in  itself,  as  a  model 
capital  for  the  entire  world  to  follow. 


7 
THE  CITY  OF  THE  SEVEN  HILLS 

YOU  can  compare  Richmond  with  Rome  if  you  will, 
with  an  allusion  upon  the  side  to  her  seven  hills; 
but,  if  you  have  even  a  remote  desire  for  originality,  you 
will  not.  Rather  compare  the  old  southern  capital  with 
a  bit  of  rare  lace  or  a  stout  bit  of  mahogany.  Of  the 
two  we  would  prefer  the  mahogany,  for  Richmond  is 
substantial,  rather  than  diaphanous.  And  like  some  of 
the  fine  old  tables  in  the  dining-rooms  of  her  great  houses 
she  has  taken  some  hard  knocks  and  in  the  long  run  come 
out  of  them  rather  well.  She  is  scarred,  but  still  beauti 
ful.  And  she  wears  her  scars,  visible  and  invisible,  both 
bravely  and  well. 

But  if  a  man  come  down  from  the  North  with  any 
idea  of  the  histories  of  that  war,  which  is  now  fifty  years 
old  and  almost  ready  to  be  forgotten,  too  sharply  in  his 
memory,  and  so  imagines  that  he  is  to  see  a  Richmond 
of  1865,  with  grass  growing  in  the  streets,  ruins  every 
where,  mules  and  negroes  in  the  streets,  he  is  doomed  to 
an  awakening.  There  are  still  plenty  of  mules  and  ne 
groes  in  the  streets  and  probably  will  be  until  the  end  of 
time,  but  the  Richmond  of  today  boasts  miles  and  miles 
of  as  fine  modern  smooth  pavements  as  his  motor  car 
might  ever  wish  to  find.  And  as  for  ruins,  bless  you, 
Richmond  has  begun  to  tear  down  some  of  the  buildings 
which  she  built  after  the  war  so  as  to  get  building-sites 
for  her  newest  skyscrapers. 

Do  not  forget  that  there  is  a  new  spirit  abroad  in  the 
South  —  and  Virginia,  in  many  ways  the  most  poetic 

127 


128     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

and  dramatic  of  all  our  states,  has  not  lagged  in  it.  There 
are  Boards  of  Trade  at  Roanoke  and  Lynchburg  that  are 
not  averse  to  sounding  the  praises  of  those  lively  manu 
facturing  towns  of  the  up-country,  and  as  for  Norfolk  — 
let  any  Norfolk  man  get  hold  of  you  and  in  two  hours 
he  will  have  almost  convinced  you  that  his  town  is  going 
to  be  the  greatest  seaport  along  the  North  Atlantic  — 
and  that  within  two  decades,  sir.  But  this  chapter  is  not 
written  of  Roanoke  or  Lynchburg  or  Norfolk.  This  is 
Richmond's  chapter  and  in  it  to  be  writ  the  fact  that  the 
capital  of  Virginia  has  not  lagged  in  enterprise  or  prog 
ress  behind  any  of  the  other  cities  of  the  state.  In  the 
transformation  she  has  sacrificed  few  of  her  landmarks, 
none  of  that  delightful  personality  that  makes  itself  ap 
parent  to  those  who  tarry  for  a  little  time  within  her 
gates.  That  makes  it  all  the  better. 

It  is  the  spirit  of  the  new  South  that  is  not  only  bring 
ing  such  wonderful  towns  as  Birmingham,  to  make  a 
single  instance,  to  the  front,  but  is  working  the  trans 
formation  of  such  staunch  old  settlements  as  Memphis 
or  Atlanta  —  or  Richmond.  Not  that  Richmond  is  will 
ing  to  forget  the  past.  There  is  something  about  the 
Virginia  spirit  that  seems  incapable  of  death.  There  is 
something  about  the  Virginian's  loyalty  to  his  native 
state,  his  blindness  to  her  imperfections,  almost  every  one 
of  them  the  result  of  decades  of  civic  poverty,  that  cannot 
escape  the  most  calloused  commercial  soul  that  ever 
walked  out  of  North  or  South.  And  there  is  something 
about  this  bringing  up  of  spirit  and  of  loyalty  with  the 
spirit  of  the  new  America  that  makes  a  combination  well- 
nigh  irresistible. 

Here,  then,  is  the  new  South.  The  generation  that 
liked  to  discuss  the  detail  of  Pickett's  charge  and  the  hor 
rors  of  those  days  in  the  Wilderness  is  gone.  The 
new  generations  are  rather  bored  with  such  detail.  The 
new  generations  are  not  less  spirited,  not  less  loyal  than 


RICHMOND  129 

the  old.  But  they  are  new.  That,  of  itself,  almost  ex 
plains  the  difference.  Now  see  it  in  a  little  closer  light. 

Volumes  have  been  written  of  the  loyalty  of  the  old 
South.  Richmond  herself  today  presents  more  volumes, 
although  unwritten,  of  that  loyalty.  You  can  read  it  in 
her  streets,  in  her  fine  old  square  houses,  in  that  stately 
building  atop  of  Shockoe  hill,  which  generations  have 
known  as  the  Capitol  and  which  was  for  a  little  time  the 
seat  of  government  of  a  new  nation.  Within  that  Cap 
itol  stands  a  statue.  It  is  the  marble  effigy  of  a  great 
Virginian,  who  was,  himself,  the  first  head  of  a  new 
government.  The  guide-books  call  it  the  Houdon  statue 
of  Washington,  and  keen  critics  have  long  since  asserted 
that  it  is  not  only  the  finest  statue  in  the  United  States 
but  one  of  the  most  notable  art  works  of  the  world.  It 
was  known  as  such  in  France  at  the  time  of  the  Civil 
War.  And  hardly  had  that  very  dark  page  in  our  history 
been  turned  before  the  Louvre  made  overtures  to  Vir 
ginia  for  the  purchase  of  the  Houdon  statue.  The  matter 
of  price  was  not  definitely  fixed.  France,  in  the  spend 
thrift  glories  of  the  Second  Empire,  was  willing  to  pay 
high  for  a  new  toy  for  her  great  gallery. 

Poor  Virginia !  She  was  hard  pressed  those  days  for 
the  necessities  of  life,  to  say  nothing  of  its  ordinary  com 
forts.  Her  pockets  were  empty.  She  was  bankrupt. 
Her  mouth  must  have  watered  a  bit  at  thought  of  those 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  French  francs.  But  she  stood 
firm,  and  if  you  know  Virginia  at  all,  you  will  say  "  of 
course  she  stood  firm."  A  Southern  gentleman  would  al 
most  repudiate  his  financial  obligations  before  he  would 
sell  one  of  the  choice  possessions  of  his  families.  There 
are  great  plantation  houses  still  standing  in  the  Old  Do 
minion,  which  were  spared  the  torch  of  war  by  the  mercy 
of  God,  and  whose  walls  hold  aloft  the  handiwork  of  the 
finest  painters  of  England,  in  the  seventeenth  and  eight 
eenth  centuries;  rare  portraits  of  the  masters  and  mis- 


130     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

tresses  of  those  old  houses.  In  them,  too,  are  furniture 
and  silver  whose  real  value  is  hardly  to  be  computed,  not 
even  by  the  screw  of  a  dealer  in  antiques.  The  folk  in 
these  old  houses  may  be  poor  —  if  they  come  of  the  oldest 
Virginia  stock  they  very  likely  are.  They  stand  bravely, 
though,  to  the  traditions  of  their  hospitality,  even  though 
they  wonder  if  the  bacon  is  going  to  last  and  if  it  is  safe 
for  the  brood  to  kill  another  chicken.  But  they  would 
close  their  kitchen  and  live  on  berries  and  on  herbs  be 
fore  they  would  part  with  even  the  humblest  piece  of 
silver  or  of  furniture ;  while  if  a  dealer  should  come  down 
from  Washington  or  New  York  and  make  an  offer,  no 
matter  how  generous,  for  one  of  the  paintings,  he  would 
probably  be  put  off  the  place. 

Family  means  much  to  these  Virginians.  If  you  do 
not  believe  this  go  to  Richmond,  stop  in  one  of  its  fine 
houses  and  make  your  host  take  you  to  one  of  the  dances 
for  which  the  city  is  famed.  Almost  any  dance  will  do 
and  from  the  beginning  you  will  be  charmed.  The  minor 
appointments  will  approach  perfection,  and  you  will  find 
the  men  and  women  of  the  city  worthy  of  its  best  tradi 
tions.  Some  places  may  disappoint  in  their  well-adver 
tised  charm  but  the  girls  of  Richmond  never  disappoint. 
Here  is  one  of  them.  She  gets  you  in  a  quiet  corner  of 
the  place,  meets  a  friend  over  there,  and  a  conversation 
somewhat  after  this  fashion  gets  under  way : 

"  Miss  Rhett,  allow  me  to  introduce  my  friend,  Mr. 
Blinkins,  of  New  York." 

You  bow  low  and  ask  Miss  Rhett  if  by  any  chance 
she  is  related  to  the  Rhetts  of  Charleston. 

"  Only  distantly.  My  people  are  all  Virginians.  The 
Charleston  Rhetts  are  quite  another  branch.  My  grand 
father's  brother  married  a  Miss  Morris,  from  Savannah 
and  the  Charleston  Rhetts  all  come  from  them.  If  my 
papa  were  only  here  he  would  explain." 

You  say  that  you  understand  and  murmur  something 


RICHMOND  131 

about  having  met  a  Richard  Henry  Rhett  at  the  old  Colo 
nial  town  of  Williamsburgh  a  few  years  ago  when  you 
were  down  for  the  Jamestown  exposition. 

"  He  was  a  Petersburgh  Rhett,"  the  young  lady  ex 
plains,  "  son  of  a  cousin  of  my  father.  He  married  Miss 
Virginia  Tredegar  last  year." 

You  remember  hearing  of  a  Miss  Virginia  Tredegar 
of  Roanoke,  and  you  slip  out  that  fact.  But  this  is  Miss 
Virginia  Tredegar  of  Weldon  and  a  cousin  of  Miss  Vir 
ginia  Tredegar  of  Roanoke.  Miss  Virginia  Tredegar  of 
Weldon  —  now  Mrs.  Richard  Henry  Rhett,  of  course,  is 
a  delightful  girl.  The  young  lady  who  has  you  in  the 
corner  assures  you  that  —  and  she,  herself,  is  not  lacking 
in  charms.  Mrs.  Rhett  was  a  sponsor  for  the  state  for 
several  years,  and  you  vaguely  wonder  just  what  that 
may  mean  as  you  have  visions  of  large  floats  lumbering 
along  in  street  parades,  with  really  lovely  girls  in  white 
standing  upon  them.  And  you  also  have  visions  of  the 
Miss  Virginia  Tredegar,  of  Weldon,  sitting  in  the  other 
days  upon  the  door-steps  of  an  old  red  and  white  Co 
lonial  house,  which  faces  a  hot  little  open  square,  visions 
of  her  accomplishments  and  her  beauty;  of  her  ability 
to  ride  the  roughest  horse  in  the  county,  to  dance  seven 
hours  without  seeming  fatigue,  of  the  jealous  beaux  who 
come  flocking  to  her  feet.  You  find  yourself  idly  speak 
ing  of  these  visions  to  your  companion.  She  laughs. 

"  I've  just  the  right  girl  for  you,"  she  says,  "  and  she 
is  here  in  this  ball-room.  She  is  all  these  things  —  and 
some  more ;  the  rightest,  smartest  girl  in  all  our  state  — 
Miss  Virginia  Beauregard,  daughter  of  Mr.  Calhoun 
Beauregard,  of  Belle  Manor  in  King  and  Queen  county." 

Apparently  they  are  all  named  Virginia  in  Richmond, 
seemingly  three-quarters  of  these  girls  who  live  in  the 
nicer  parts  of  the  town  are  thus  to  bespeak  through  their 
lives  the  affectionate  loyalty  of  their  parents  to  the  Old 
Dominion. 


132     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

All  these  folk  come  quite  easily  to  the  transformation 
that  has  come  over  the  South  within  the  decade,  since 
she  ceased  to  grieve  over  a  past  that  could  never  be 
brought  back  and  overcome.  The  young  boys  and  the 
young  girls  turn  readily  from  fine  horses  to  fine  motor 
cars,  the  coming  of  imported  customs  causes  few  shocks, 
it  is  even  rumored  that  the  newest  of  the  new  dances 
have  invaded  the  sober  drawing-rooms  of  the  place.  But 
the  New  South  is  kind  to  Richmond.  She  does  not  seek 
to  eliminate  the  Old  South.  And  so  the  old  customs  and 
the  old  traditions  run  side  by  side  with  the  new.  And 
even  the  old  families  seem  to  soften  and  many  times  to 
welcome  the  new. 

If  you  wish  to  see  the  real  Old  South  in  Richmond  go 
out  to  Hollywood  cemetery,  which  is  perhaps  the  great 
est  of  all  its  landmarks.  It  is  easy  of  access,  very  beau 
tiful,  although  not  in  the  elaborate  and  immaculate  fash 
ion  of  Greenwood,  at  Brooklyn,  or  Mount  Auburn,  just 
outside  of  Boston.  But  where  man  has  fallen  short  at 
Hollywood,  Nature  has  more  than  done  her  part.  She 
rounded  the  lovely  hills  upon  which  Richmond  might 
place  the  treasure-chest  of  her  memories,  and  then  she 
swept  the  finest  of  all  Virginia  rivers  —  the  James  —  by 
those  hills.  Man  did  the  rest.  It  was  man  who  created 
the  roadways  and  who  placed  the  monuments.  And  not 
the  least  interesting  of  these  is  the  strange  tomb  of  Presi 
dent  James  Monroe,  an  imposing  bronze  structure,  in 
these  days  reminding  one  of  an  enlarged  bird-cage.  It 
is  interesting  perhaps  because  nearby  there  is  another 
grave  —  the  grave  of  still  another  man  who  came  to  the 
highest  office  of  the  American  people.  The  second  grave 
is  marked  by  a  small  headstone,  scarcely  large  enough  to 
accommodate  its  two  words:  "  John  Tyler." 

But  more  interesting  than  these  older  monuments  is 
the  group  that  stands  alone,  at  the  far  corner  of  the  ceme- 


RICHMOND  133 

tery  and  atop  of  one  of  those  little  hillocks  close  beside 
the  river.  The  head  of  that  family  is  buried  beneath  his 
effigy.  It  is  the  grave  of  Jefferson  Davis,  who  stands 
facing  the  city,  as  if  he  still  dreamed  of  the  days  that 
might  have  been  but  never  were.  And  close  beside  is 
the  grave  of  his  little  girl,  "  The  Daughter  of  Confed 
eracy."  When  she  died,  only  a  few  years  since,  the 
South  felt  that  the  last  of  the  living  links  that  tied  it  with 
the  days  when  men  fought  and  died  for  the  Lost  Cause 
had  been  severed.  It  was  then  that  it  set  to  work  to 
build  the  new  out  of  the  old. 

Nowadays  the  Old  South  does  not  come  publicly  into 
the  streets  of  Richmond  —  save  on  that  memorable  occa 
sion  in  the  spring  of  1907  when  a  feeble  trail  of  aging 
men  —  all  that  remained  of  a  great  gray  army  —  limped 
down  a  triumphant  path  through  the  heart  of  the  town. 
The  Old  South  sits  in  her  dead  cities,  and  perhaps  that 
is  the  reason  why  the  Southerner  so  quickly  takes  the 
stranger  within  his  gates  to  the  cemetery.  It  is  his 
apologies  for  thirty  or  forty  years  lost  in  the  march  of 
progress.  And  it  is  an  apology  that  no  man  of  breadth 
or  generosity  can  refuse  to  accept. 

Here,  then,  is  the  new  Richmond,  riding  stoutly  upon 
her  great  hills  and  shooting  the  tendrils  of  her  growth 
in  every  direction.  For  she  is  growing,  rapidly  and  hand 
somely.  Her  new  buildings  —  her  wonderful  cathedral, 
her  superb  modern  hotels,  the  fine  homes  multiplying 
out  by  the  Lee  statue  —  what  self-respecting  southern 
town  does  not  have  a  Lee  statue  —  all  bespeak  the  quality 
of  her  growth.  But  her  new  buildings  cannot  easily  sur 
pass  the  old.  It  was  rare  good  judgment  in  an  American 
town  for  her  to  refrain  from  tearing  down  or  even 
"  modernizing "  that  Greek  temple  that  stands  atop  of 
Shockoe  hill  and  which  generations  have  known  as  the 
Capitol.  The  two  flanking  wings  which  were  made  ab- 


134     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

solutely  necessary  by  the  awakening  of  the  Old  Dominion 
have  not  robbed  the  older  portion  of  the  building  of  one 
whit  of  its  charm. 

It  typifies  the  Old  South  and  the  New  South,  come  to 
stand  beside  one  another.  In  other  days  Virginia  was 
proud  of  her  capital,  it  was  with  no  small  pride  that  she 
thrust  it  ahead  when  a  seat  of  government  was  to  be 
chosen  for  the  Confederacy,  that  for  a  little  time  she  saw 
it  take  its  stormy  place  among  the  nations  of  the  world. 
In  these  days  Virginia  may  still  be  proud  of  her  capital 
town  —  it  is  still  a  seat  of  government  quite  worthy  of 
a  state  of  pride  and  of  traditions. 


8 

WHERE  ROMANCE  AND  COURTESY  DO  NOT 
FORGET 


(i^VT'OU  are  not  going  to  write  your  book  and  leave  out 
J[     Charleston  ?  "  said  the  Man  who  Makes  Maga 
zines. 

We  hesitated  at  acknowledging  the  truth.  In  some 
way  or  other  Charleston  had  escaped  us  upon  our  travels. 
The  Magazine  Maker  read  our  answer  before  we  could 
gain  strength  to  make  it. 

"  Well,  you  can't  afford  to  miss  that  town,"  he  said 
conclusively.  "  It's  great  stuff." 

"  Great  stuff?  "  we  ventured. 

"  If  you  are  looking  into  the  personality  of  American 
cities  you  must  include  Charleston.  She  has  more  per 
sonality  than  any  of  the  other  old  Colonial  towns  —  save 
Boston.  She's  personality  personified,  old  age  glorified, 
charm  and  sweetness  magnified  —  the  flavor  of  the  past 
hangs  in  every  one  of  her  old  houses  and  her  narrow 
streets.  You  cannot  pass  by  Charleston." 

After  that  we  went  over  to  a  railroad  ticket  office  in 
Fifth  avenue  and  purchased  a  round-trip  ticket  to  the 
metropolis  of  South  Carolina.  And  a  week  later  we 
were  on  a  southbound  train,  running  like  mad  across  the 
Jersey  meadows.  Five  days  in  Charleston!  It  seemed 
almost  sacrilege.  Five  miserable  days  in  the  town  which 
the  Maker  of  Magazines  averred  fairly  oozed  personality. 
But  five  days  were  better  than  no  days  at  all  —  and 
Charleston  must  be  included  in  this  book. 

The  greater  part  of  one  day  —  crossing  New  Jersey, 
Pennsylvania,  the  up-stretched  head  of  little  Delaware, 

135 


136      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Maryland  —  finally  the  Old  Dominion  and  the  real  South. 
A  day  spent  behind  the  glass  of  the  car  window  —  the 
brisk  and  busy  Jersey  towns,  the  Delaware  easily  crossed ; 
Philadelphia,  with  her  great  outspreading  of  suburbs ; 
Wilmington ;  a  short  cut  through  the  basements  of  Balti 
more;  the  afternoon  light  dying  on  the  superb  dome 
of  the  Washington  Capitol  —  after  that  the  Potomac. 
Then  a  few  evening  hours  through  Virginia,  the  south 
ern  accent  growing  more  pronounced,  the  very  air  softer, 
the  negroes  more  prevalent,  the  porter  of  our  car  con 
tinually  more  deferential,  more  polite.  After  that  a  few 
hours  of  oblivion,  even  in  the  clattering  Pullman  which, 
after  the  fashion  of  all  these  tremendously  safe  new  steel 
cars,  was  a  bit  chilly  and  a  bit  noisy. 

In  the  morning  a  low  and  unkempt  land,  the  railroad 
trestling  its  way  over  morass  and  swamp  and  bayou  on 
long  timber  structures  and  many  times  threading  sluggish 
yellow  southern  rivers  by  larger  bridges.  Between 
these  a  sandy  mainland — thick  forests  of  pine  with  in 
creasing  numbers  of  live-oaks  holding  soft  moss  aloft 
—  at  last  the  outskirts  of  a  town.  Other  folk  might 
gather  their  luggage  together,  the  vision  of  a  distant 
place  with  its  white  spires,  the  soft  gray  fog  that  tells 
of  the  proximity  of  the  open  sea  blowing  in  upon  them, 
held  us  at  the  window  pane.  A  river  showed  itself  in 
the  distance  to  the  one  side  of  the  train,  with  mast-heads 
dominating  its  shores ;  another,  lined  with '  factories 
stretched  upon  the  other  side.  After  these,  the  streets 
of  the  town,  a  trolley  car  stalled  impatient  to  let  our  train 
pass  —  low  streets  and  mean  streets  of  an  unmistakable 
negro  quarter,  the  broad  shed  of  a  sizable  railroad  station 
showing  at  the  right. 

"  Charleston,  sah,"  said  the  porter.  Remember  now 
that  he  had  been  a  haughty  creature  in  New  York  and 
Philadelphia,  ebon  dignity  in  Baltimore  and  in  Wash- 


CHARLESTON  137 

ington.  Now  he  was  docility  itself,  a  courtesy  hardly  to 
be  measured  by  the  mere  expectation  of  gratuity. 

The  first  glimpse  of  Charleston  a  rough  paved  street 
—  our  hotel  'bus  finding  itself  with  almost  dangerous 
celerity  in  front  of  trolley  cars.  That  unimportant  way 
led  into  another  broad  -highway  of  the  town  and  seemingly 
entitled  to  distinction. 

"  Meeting  street,"  said  our  driver.  "  And  I  can  tell 
you  that  Charleston  is  right  proud  of  it,  sir,"  he  added. 

Charleston  has  good  cause  to  be  proud  of  its  main 
highway,  with  the  lovely  old  houses  along  it  rising  out 
of  blooming  gardens,  like  fine  ladies  from  their  ball 
gowns ;  at  its  upper  end  the  big  open  square  and  the  ad 
jacent  Citadel  —  pouring  out  its  gray-uniformed  boys  to 
drill  just  as  their  daddies  and  their  grand-daddies  drilled 
there  before  them  —  the  charms  of  St.  Michael's,  and 
the  never-to-be-forgotten  Battery  at  the  foot  of  the 
street. 

We  sped  down  it  and  drew  up  at  a  snow-white  hotel 
which  in  its  immaculate  coat  might  have  sprung  up  yes 
terday,  were  it  not  for  the  stately  row  of  great  pillars, 
three  stories  in  height,  with  which  it  faced  the  street. 
They  do  not  build  'hotels  that  way  nowadays  —  more's 
the  pity.  For  when  the  Charleston  Hotel  was  builded  it 
entered  a  distinguished  brotherhood  —  the  Tremont  in 
Boston,  the  Astor  and  the  St.  Nicholas  in  New  York, 
Willard's  in  Washington,  the  Monongahela  at  Pittsburgh, 
and  the  St.  Charles  in  New  Orleans  were  among  its  con 
temporaries.  It  was  worthy  to  be  ranked  with  the  best 
of  these  —  a  hotel  at  which  the  great  planters  of  the 
Carolinas  and  of  Georgia  could  feel  that  the  best  had 
been  created  for  them  within  the  very  heart  of  their 
favorite  city. 

We  pushed  our  way  into  the  heart  of  the  generous 
office  of  the  hotel,  thronged  with  the  folk  who  had 


138     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

crowded  into  Charleston  —  followers  of  the  races,  just 
then  holding  sway  upon  the  outskirts  of  the  town,  tour 
ists  from  the  North,  Carolinans  who  will  never  lose  the 
habit  of  going  to  Charleston  as  long  as  Charleston  exists. 
In  due  time  a  brisk  and  bustling  hotel  clerk  —  he  was 
an  importation,  plainly,  none  of  your  courteous,  ease- 
taking  Southerners  —  had  placed  us  in  a  room  big  enough 
for  the  holding  of  a  reception.  From  the  shutters  of  the 
room  we  could  look  down  into  Meeting  street  —  into  the 
charred  remnants  of  a  store  that  had  been  burned  long 
before  and  the  debris  never  removed.  When  we  threw 
up  the  window  sash  we  could  thrust  our  heads  out  and 
see,  a  little  way  down  the  street,  the  most  distinctive  and 
the  most  revered  of  all  Charleston's  landmarks  —  the 
belfried  spire  of  St.  Michael's.  As  we  leaned  from  that 
window  the  bells  of  St.  Michael's  spoke  the  quarter-hour, 
just  as  they  have  been  speaking  quarter-hours  close  upon 
a  century  and  a  half. 

We  had  been  given  the  first  taste  of  the  potent  charm 
of  a  most  distinctive  southern  town. 

".  .  .  The  most  appealing,  the  most  lovely,  the  most 
wistful  town  in  America;  whose  visible  sadness  and  dis 
tinction  seem  almost  to  speak  audibly,  speak  in  the  sound 
of  the  quiet  waves  that  ripple  round  her  southern  front, 
speak  in  the  church-bells  on  Sunday  morning  and  breathe 
not  only  in  the  soft  salt  air,  but  in  the  perfume  of  every 
gentle,  old-fashioned  rose  that  blooms  behind  the  high 
garden  walls  of  falling  mellow-tinted  plaster ;  King's  Port 
the  retrospective,  King's  Port  the  belated,  who  from  her 
pensive  porticoes  looks  over  her  two  rivers  to  the  marshes 
and  the  trees  beyond,  the  live-oaks  veiled  in  gray  moss, 
brooding  with  memories.  Were  she  my  city  how  I 
should  love  her.  .  .  ." 

So  wrote  Owen  Wister  of  the  city  that  he  came  to 
know  so  well.  You  can  read  Charleston  in  Lady  Balti- 


CHARLESTON  139 

more  each  time  he  speaks  of  "  King's  Port "  and  read 
correctly.  For  it  was  in  Charleston  he  spun  his  romance 
of  the  last  stronghold  of  old  manners,  old  families,  old 
traditions  and  old  affections.  In  no  other  city  of  the  land 
might  he  have  laid  such  a  story.  For  no  other  city  of 
the  land  bears  the  memory  of  tragedy  so  plaintively,  so 
uncomplainingly  as  the  old  town  that  occupies  the  flat 
peninsula  between  the  Cooper  and  the  Ashley  rivers  at 
the  very  gateway  of  South  Carolina.  Like  a  scarred 
man,  Charleston  will  bear  the  visible  traces  of  her  great 
disaster  until  the  end  of  her  days.  And  each  of  them, 
like  the  scars  of  Richmond,  makes  her  but  the  more 
potent  in  her  charm. 

Up  one  street  and  down  another  —  fascinating  path 
ways,  every  blessed  one  of  them.  Meeting  and  King  and 
Queen  and  Legare  and  Calhoun  and  Tradd  —  with  their 
high,  narrow-ended  houses  rising  right  from  the  side 
walks  and  stretching,  with  their  generous  spirit  of  hos 
pitality,  inward,  beside  gardens  that  blossom  as  only  a 
southern  garden  can  bloom  —  with  jessamine  and  nar 
cissus  and  oleander  and  japonica.  Galleries  give  to  these 
fragrant  gardens.  Only  Charleston,  unique  among  her 
sisters  of  the  Southland,  does  not  call  them  galleries. 
She  calls  them  piazzas,  with  the  accent  strong  upon  the 

-pi." 

The  gardens  themselves  are  more  than  a  little  Eng 
lish,  speaking  clearly  something  of  the  old-time  English 
spirit  of  the  town,  which  has  its  most  visible  other  ex 
pression  in  the  stolid  Georgian  architecture  of  its  older 
public  buildings  and  churches.  And  some  of  the  older 
folk,  defying  the  Charleston  convention  of  four  o'clock 
dinner,  will  take  tea  in  the  softness  of  the  late  afternoon. 
Local  tradition  still  relates  how,  in  other  days,  a  certain 
distinguished  and  elderly  citizen,  possessing  neither  gar 
den  nor  gallery  with  his  house,  was  wont  to  have  a  table 
and  chair  placed  upon  the  sidewalk  and  there  take  his 


140     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

tea  of  a  late  afternoon.  And  the  Charleston  of  that 
other  day  walked  upon  the  far  side  of  the  street  rather 
than  disturb  the  gentleman ! 

Nor  is  all  that  spirit  quite  gone  in  the  Charleston  of 
today.  The  older  negroes  will  touch  their  hats,  if  not 
remove  them,  when  you  glance  at  them.  They  will  step 
into  the  gutter  when  you  pass  them  upon  the  narrow 
sidewalks  of  the  narrow  streets.  They  came  of  a  gen 
eration  that  made  more  than  the  small  distinction  of  sep 
arate  schools  and  separate  places  in  the  railroad  cars 
between  white  and  black.  But  they  are  rapidly  disap 
pearing  from  the  streets  of  the  old  city.  Those  younger 
negroes  who  drive  the  clumsy  two-wheeled  carts  in  town 
and  out  over  the  rough-paved  streets  have  learned  no 
good  manners.  And  when  the  burly  negresses  who 
amble  up  the  sidewalks  balancing  huge  trays  of  crabs  or 
fresh  fruits  or  baked  stuffs  smile  at  you,  theirs  is  the 
smile  of  insolence.  Fifty  years  of  the  Fifteenth  Amend 
ment  have  done  their  work  —  any  older  resident  of 
Charleston  will  tell  you  that,  and  thank  God  for  the 
inborn  courtesy  that  keeps  him  from  profanity  with  the 
telling. 

But  if  oncoming  years  have  worked  great  changes  in 
the  manner  of  the  race  which  continues  to  be  of  numer 
ical  importance  in  the  seaport  city,  it  will  take  more  than 
one  or  two  or  three  or  even  four  generations  to  work 
great  changes  in  the  manners  of  the  well-born  white- 
skinned  folk  who  have  ruled  Charleston  through  the 
years  by  wit,  diplomacy,  the  keen  force  of  intellect  more 
than  even  the  force  of  arms.  And,  as  the  city  now  runs 
its  course,  it  will  take  far  more  years  for  her  to  change 
her  outward  guise. 

For  Charleston  does  not  change  easily.  She  continues 
to  be  a  city  of  yellow  and  of  white.  Other  southern 
towns  may  claim  distinction  because  of  their  red-walled 
brick  houses  with  their  white  porticos,  but  the  reds  of 


CHARLESTON  141 

Charleston  long  since  softened,  the  green  moss  and  the 
lichens  have  grown  up  and  over  the  old  walls  —  exquisite 
bits  of  masonry,  every  one  of  them  and  the  products  of 
an  age  when  every  artisan  was  an  artist  and  full  master 
of  his  craft.  The  distinctive  color  of  the  town  shades 
from  a  creamy  yellow  to  a  grayish  white.  The  houses, 
as  we  have  already  said,  stand  with  their  ends  to  the 
streets,  with  flanking  walls  hiding  the  rich  gardens  from 
the  sidewalk,  save  for  a  few  seductive  glimpses  through 
the  well-wrought  grillings  of  an  occasional  gateway. 
Charleston  does  not  parade  herself.  The  closed  windows 
of  her  houses  seem  to  close  jealously  against  the  Present 
as  if  they  sought  to  hold  within  their  great  rooms  the 
Past  and  all  of  the  glories  that  were  of  it. 

Builded  of  brick  in  most  instances,  the  larger  houses 
and  the  two  most  famous  churches,  as  well,  were  long 
ago  given  plaster  coatings  that  they  might  conform  to 
the  yellow-white  dominating  color  of  the  town.  Inva 
riably  very  high  and  almost  invariably  very  narrow  and 
bald  of  cornice,  these  old  houses  are  roofed  with  heavy 
corrugated  tiles,  once  red  but  now  softened  by  Time  into 
a  dozen  different  tints.  If  there  is  another  town  in  the 
land  where  roof-tile  has  been  used  to  such  picturesque 
advantage  we  have  failed  to  see  it.  It  gives  to  Charles 
ton  an  incredibly  foreign  aspect.  If  it  were  not  for  the 
Georgian  churches  and  the  older  public  buildings  one 
might  see  in  the  plaster  walls  and  the  red-tiled  roofs  a 
distinct  trace  of  the  French  or  the  Italian.  Charleston 
herself  is  not  unlike  many  towns  that  sleep  in  the  south 
of  France  or  the  north  of  Italy.  It  only  takes  the  hordes 
of  negroes  upon  her  streets  to  dispel  the  illusion  that  one 
is  again  treading  some  corner  of  the  Old  World. 

Perhaps  the  best  way  that  the  casual  visitor  to  Charles 
ton  can  appreciate  these  negroes  is  in  their  street  calls 
—  if  he  has  not  been  up  too  late  upon  the  preceding  night. 
For  long  before  seven  o'clock  the  brigades  of  itinerant 


142     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

merchants  are  on  their  ways  through  the  narrow  streets 
of  the  old  town.  From  the  soft,  deep  marshlands  behind 
it  and  the  crevices  and  the  turnings  of  the  sea  and  all  its 
inlets  come  the  finest  and  the  rarest  of  delicacies,  and 
these  food-stuffs  find  their  way  quite  naturally  to  the 
street  vendors.  Porgies  and  garden  truck,  lobsters  and 
shrimp  and  crab,  home-made  candies  —  the  list  runs  to 
great  length. 

You  turn  restlessly  in  your  bed  at  dawn.     Something 
has  stolen  that  last  precious  "  forty  winks  "  away  from 
you.     If    you    could    find    that    something.  .  .  .  Hark. 
There  it  is:     Through  the  crispness  of  morning  air  it 
comes  musically  to  your  ears: 
"Swimpy  waw,  waw.  .  .  .  Swimpy  waw,  waw." 
And  from  another  direction  comes  a  slowly  modu 
lated  : 

"  Waw  cwab.  WAW  Cwab.  Waw  Cwa-a-a-b." 
A  sharp  staccato  breaks  in  upon  both  of  these. 
"  She  cwaib,  she  cwaib,  she  cwaib,"  it  calls,  and  you 
know  that  there  is  a  preference  in  crabs.  Up  one  street 
and  down  another,  male  vendors,  female  vendors  old  and 
young,  but  generally  old.  If  any  one  wishes  to  sleep  in 
Charleston  —  well,  he  simply  cannot  sleep  late  in  Charles 
ton.  To  dream  of  rest  while :  "  Sweet  Pete  ate  her ! 
Sweet  Pete  ate  her !  "  comes  rolling  up  to  your  window 
in  tones  as  dulcet  as  ever  rang  within  an  opera  house 
would  be  outrageous.  It  is  a  merry  jangle  to  open  the 
day,  quite  as  remote  from  euphony  and  as  thoroughly 
delightful  as  the  early  morning  church-bells  of  Montreal 
or  of  Quebec.  By  breakfast  time  it  is  quite  gone  — 
unless  you  wish  to  include  the  coal-black  mammy  who 
chants :  "  Come  chilluns,  get  yer  monkey  meat  —  mon 
key  meat."  And  that  old  relic  of  ante-bellum  days  who 
rides  a  two-wheel  cart  in  all  the  narrow  lanes  and  per 
meates  the  very  air  with  his  melanchholy :  "  Char  — 
coal.  Char  —  coal." 


CHARLESTON  143 

If  you  inquire  as  to  "  monkey  meat,"  your  Charles- 
tonian  will  tell  you  of  the  delectable  mixture  of  cocoa- 
nut  and  molasses  candy  which  is  to  the  younger  gener 
ation  of  the  town  as  the  incomparable  Lady  Baltimore 
cake  is  to  the  older. 

The  churches  of  Charleston  are  her  greatest  charm. 
And  of  these,  boldly  asserting  its  prerogative  by  rising 
from  the  busiest  corner  of  the  town,  the  most  famed  is 
St.  Michael's.  St.  Michael's  is  the  lion  of  Charleston. 
Since  1764  she  has  stood  there  at  Broad  and  Meeting 
streets  and  demanded  the  obeisance  of  the  port  —  gladly 
rendered  her.  She  has  stood  to  her  corner  through  sun 
shine  and  through  storm  —  through  the  glad  busy  years 
when  Charleston  dreamed  of  power  and  of  surpassing 
those  upstart  northern  towns  —  New  York  and  Boston 
—  through  the  bitterness  of  two  great  wars  and  the 
dangers  of  a  third  and  lesser  one,  through  four  cyclones 
and  the  most  devastating  earthquake  that  the  Atlantic 
coast  has  ever  known  —  through  all  these  perils  this 
solidly  wrought  Temple  of  the  Lord  has  come  safely. 
She  is  the  real  old  lady  of  Charleston,  and  when  she 
speaks  the  folk  within  the  town  stand  at  attention.  The 
soft,  sweet  bells  of  St.  Michael's  are  the  tenderest  mem 
ory  that  can  come  to  a  resident  of  the  city  when  he  is 
gone  a  long  way  from  her  streets  and  her  lovely  homes. 
And  when  the  bells  of  St.  Michael's  have  been  stilled 
it  has  been  a  stilled  Charleston. 

For  there  have  been  times  when  the  bells  of  St. 
Michael's  have  not  spoken  down  from  their  high  white 
belfry.  In  fact,  they  have  crossed  the  Atlantic  not  less 
than  five  times.  Cast  in  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth 
century  in  an  English  bell-foundry,  they  had  hardly  been 
hung  within  their  belfry  before  the  Revolution  broke 
out  —  broke  out  at  Charleston  just  as  did  the  Civil  War. 
Before  the  British  left  the  city  for  the  last  time  the  com- 


144     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

manding  officer  had  claimed  the  eight  bells  as  his  "  per 
quisite  "  and  had  shipped  them  back  to  England.  An 
indignant  American  town  demanded  their  return.  Even 
the  British  commanding  officer  at  New  York,  Sir  Guy 
Carleton,  did  not  have  it  within  his  heart  to  countenance 
such  sacrilege.  The  bells  had  been  already  sold  in  Eng 
land  upon  a  speculation,  but  the  purchaser  was  compelled 
to  return  them.  The  people  of  the  Colonial  town  drew 
them  from  the  wharf  to  St.  Michael's  in  formal  proces 
sion —  the  swinging  of  them  anew  was  hardly  a  less 
ceremonial.  The  first  notes  they  sang  were  like  unto  a 
religious  rite.  And  for  seventy  years  the  soft  voice  of 
the  old  lady  of  Charleston  spoke  down  to  her  children 
—  at  the  quarters  of  the  hours. 

After  those  seventy  years  more  war  —  ugly  guns  that 
are  remembered  with  a  shudder  as  "  Swamp  Angels," 
pouring  shells  into  a  proud,  rebellious,  hungry,  unrelent 
ing  city,  the  stout  white  tower  of  St.  Michael's  a  fair  and 
shining  mark  for  northern  gunners.  Charleston  sud 
denly  realized  the  danger  to  the  voice  of  her  pet  old 
lady.  There  were  few  able-bodied  men  in  the  town  — 
all  of  them  were  fighting  within  the  Confederate  lines  — 
but  they  unshipped  those  precious  bells  and  sent  them 
up-state  —  to  Columbia,  the  state  capitol,  far  inland  and 
safe  from  the  possibility  of  sea  marauders.  They  were 
hidden  there  but  not  so  well  but  that  Sherman's  men  in 
the  march  to  the  sea  found  them  and  by  an  act  of  van 
dalism  which  the  South  today  believes  far  greater  than 
that  of  an  angered  British  army,  completely  destroyed 
them. 

When  peace  came  again  Charleston  —  bruised  and  bat 
tered  and  bleeding  Charleston,  with  the  scars  that  time 
could  never  heal  —  gave  first  thought  to  her  bells  —  a 
mere  mass  of  molten  and  broken  metal.  There  was  a 
single  chance  and  Charleston  took  it.  That  chance  won. 
The  English  are  a  conservative  nation  —  to  put  it  lightly. 


CHARLESTON  145 

The  old  bell-foundry  still  had  the  molds  in  which  the 
chime  was  first  cast  —  a  hundred  years  before.  Once 
again  those  old  casts  were  wheeled  into  the  foundry  and 
from  them  came  again  the  bells  of  St.  Michael's,  the 
sweetness  of  their  tones  unchanged.  The  town  had  re 
gained  its  voice. 

If  we  have  dwelt  at  length  upon  the  bells  of  St. 
Michael's  it  is  because  they  speak  so  truly  the  real  per 
sonality  of  the  town.  The  church  itself  is  not  of  less 
interest.  And  the  churchyard  that  surrounds  it  upon 
two  sides  is  as  filled  with  charm  and  rare  flavor  as  any 
churchyard  we  have  ever  seen.  Under  its  old  stones 
sleep  forever  the  folk  who  lived  in  Charleston  in  the  days 
of  her  glories  —  Pringles  and  Pinckneys ;  Moultries ; 
those  three  famous  "  R's"  of  South  Carolina  —  Rutledge 
and  Ravenel  and  Rhett  —  the  names  within  that  silent 
place  read  like  the  roster  of  the  colonial  aristocracy. 
Above  the  silent  markers,  the  moldering  and  crumbling 
tombs,  rises  a  riot  of  God's  growing  things;  in  the  soft 
southern  air  a  perpetual  tribute  to  the  dead  —  narcissus, 
oleander,  jessamine,  the  stately  Pride  of  India  bush. 
And  on  the  morning  that  we  first  strolled  into  the  shady, 
quiet  place  a  red-bird  —  the  famous  Cardinal  Grosbeak 
of  the  south  —  sang  to  us  from  his  perch  in  a  magnolia 
tree.  Twenty- four  hours  before  and  we  had  crossed  the 
Hudson  river  at  New  York  in  a  driving  and  a  blizzard- 
threatening  snowstorm. 

The  greatest  charm  of  St.  Michael's  does  not  rest  alone 
within  the  little  paths  of  her  high-walled  churchyard. 
Within  the  sturdy  church,  in  the  serenity  of  her  sanc 
tuary,  in  the  great  square  box-pews  where  sat  so  many 
years  the  elect  of  Charleston,  of  the  very  Southland  you 
might  say;  in  the  high-set  pulpit  and  the  unusual  desk 
underneath  where  sat  the  old  time  "  dark  "  to  read  the 
responses  and  the  notices ;  even  the  stately  pew,  set  aside 
from  all  the  others,  in  which  General  Washington  sat  on 


146     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

the  occasion  of  a  memorable  visit  to  the  South  Carolina 
town,  is  the  fullness  of  her  charm.  If  you  are  given 
imagination,  you  can  see  the  brown  and  white  church 
rilled  as  in  the  old  days  with  the  planters  and  their  fam 
ilies  —  generation  after  generation  of  them,  coming  first 
to  the  church,  being  baptized  in  its  dove-crowned  font 
at  the  door  and  then,  years  later,  being  carried  out  of 
that  center  aisle  for  the  final  time.  You  can  see  the 
congregations  of  half  a  century  ago,  faces  white  and  set 
and  determined.  You  can  see  one  memorable  congre 
gation,  as  it  hears  the  crash  of  a  Federal  shell  against 
the  heavy  tower,  and  then  listen  to  the  gentle  rector  fin 
ishing  the  invocation  of  the  Litany  before  he  dismisses 
his  little  flock. 

Dear  old  St.  Michael's !  The  years  —  the  sunny  years 
and  the  tragic  years  —  set  lightly  upon  her.  When  war 
and  storm  have  wrecked  her,  it  has  been  her  children  and 
her  children's  children  who  have  arisen  to  help  wipe 
away  the  scars.  In  a  memorable  storm  of  August,  1885, 
the  great  wooden  ball  at  the  top  of  her  weather  vane, 
one  hundred  and  eighty-five  feet  above  the  street  was 
sent  hurtling  down  to  the  ground.  They  will  show  you 
the  dent  it  made  in  the  pavement  flag.  It  was  quickly 
replaced.  But  within  a  year  worse  than  cyclone  was 
upon  St.  Michael's  —  the  memorable  earthquake  which 
sank  the  great  tower  eight  inches  deeper  into  the  earth. 
And  only  last  year  another  of  the  fearful  summer  storms 
that  come  now  and  then  upon  the  place  wreaked  fearful 
damage  upon  the  old  church.  Yet  St.  Michael's  has  been 
patiently  repaired  each  time ;  she  still  towers  above  these 
disasters  —  as  her  quaint  weather-vane  towers  above  the 
town,  itself. 

After  St.  Michael's,  St.  Philip's  —  although  St.  Philip's 
is  the  real  mother  church  of  all  Charleston.  The  old 


St.  Michael's  churchyard,  Charleston— a  veritable  roster 
of  the  Colonial  Elect 


CHARLESTON  147 

town  does  not  pin  her  faith  upon  a  single  lion.  The  first 
time  we  found  our  way  down  Meeting  street,  we  saw 
a  delicate  and  belfried  spire  rising  above  the  greenery 
of  the  trees  in  a  distant  churchyard.  The  staunch  church 
from  which  that  spire  springs  was  well  worth  our  at 
tention.  And  so  we  found  our  way  to  St.  Philip's.  We 
turned  down  Broad  street  from  St.  Michael's  —  to  com 
mercial  Charleston  as  its  namesake  street  is  to  New  York 
—  then  at  the  little  red-brick  library,  housed  in  the  same 
place  for  nearly  three-quarters  of  a  century,  we  turned 
again.  The  south  portico  of  St.  Philip's,  tall-columned, 
dignified  almost  beyond  expression,  confronted  us.  And 
a  moment  later  we  found  ourselves  within  a  churchyard 
that  ranked  in  interest  and  importance  with  that  of  St. 
Michael's,  itself. 

A  shambling  negro  care-taker  came  toward  us.  He 
had  been  engaged  in  helping  some  children  get  a  kitten 
down  from  the  upper  branches  of  a  tree  in  the  old  church 
yard.  With  the  intuition  of  his  kind,  he  saw  in  us, 
strangers  —  manifest  possibilities.  He  devoted  himself 
to  attention  upon  us.  And  he  sounded  the  praises  of 
his  own  exhibit  in  no  mild  key. 

"  Yessa  —  de  fines'  church  in  all  de  South,"  he  said,  as 
he  swung  the  great  door  of  St.  Philip's  wide  open.  He 
seemed  to  feel,  also  intuitively,  that  we  had  just  come 
from  the  rival  exhibit.  And  we  felt  more  than  a  slight 
suspicion  of  jealousy  within  the  air. 

The  negro  was  right.  St.  Philip's,  Charleston,  is  more 
than  the  finest  church  in  all  the  South.  Perhaps  it  is 
not  too  much  to  say  that  it  is  the  most  beautiful  church 
in  all  the  land.  Copied,  rather  broadly,  from  St.  Mar- 
tins-in-the-Fields,  London,  it  thrusts  itself  out  into  the 
street,  indeed,  makes  the  highway  take  a  broad  double 
curve  in  order  to  pass  its  front  portico.  But  St.  Philip's 
commits  the  fearful  Charleston  sin  of  being  new.  The 


148     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

present  structure  has  only  been  thrusting  its  nose  out  into 
Church  street  for  a  mere  eighty  years.  The  old  St. 
Philip's  was  burned  —  one  of  the  most  fearful  of  all 
Charleston  tragedies  —  in  1834. 

"  Yessa  —  a  big  fire  dat,"  said  the  caretaker.  "  They 
gib  two  slaves  dere  freedom  for  helpin'  at  dat  fire." 

But  history  only  records  the  fact  that  the  efforts  to 
put  out  the  fire  in  St.  Philip's  were  both  feeble  and  futile. 
It  does  tell,  however,  of  a  negro  sailor  who,  when  the 
old  church  was  threatened  by  fire  on  an  earlier  occasion, 
climbed  to  the  tower  and  tore  the  blazing  shingles  from 
it  and  was  afterward  presented  with  his  freedom  and  a 
fishing-boat  and  outfit.  Does  that  sound  familiar?  It 
was  in  our  Third  Reader  —  some  lurid  verses  but,  alas 
for  the  accuracy  that  should  be  imparted  to  the  grow 
ing  mind  —  it  was  St.  Michael's  to  whom  that  wide 
spread  glory  was  given.  St.  Michael's  of  the  heart  of  the 
town  once  again.  No  wonder  that  St.  Philip's  of  the 
side-street  grieves  in  silence. 

In  silence,  you  say.  How  about  the  bells  of  St. 
Philip's? 

If  you  are  from  the  North  it  were  better  that  you  did 
not  ask  that  question.  The  bells  of  St.  Philip's,  in  their 
day  hardly  less  famous  than  those  of  the  sister  church, 
went  into  cannon  for  the  defense  of  the  South.  When 
the  last  of  the  copper  gutters  had  been  torn  from  the 
barren  houses,  when  the  final  iron  kettle  had  gone  to  the 
gun-foundry,  the  supreme  sacrifice  was  made.  The  bells 
rang  merrily  on  a  Sabbath  morn  and  for  a  final  time. 
The  next  day  they  were  unshipping  them  and  one  of  the 
silvery  voices  of  Charleston  was  forever  hushed. 

But  St.  Philip's  has  her  own  distinctions.  In  the  first 
place,  her  own  graveyard  is  a  roll-call  of  the  Colonial 
elect.  Within  it  stands  the  humble  tomb  of  him  who  was 
the  greatest  of  all  the  great  men  of  South  Carolina  — 
John  C.  Calhoun  —  while  nightly  from  her  high-lifted 


CHARLESTON  149 

spire  there  gleams  the  only  light  that  ever  a  church-tower 
sent  far  out  to  sea  for  the  guidance  of  the  mariner.  The 
ship-pilots  along  the  North  Atlantic  very  well  know 
when  they  pass  Charleston  light-ship,  that  the  range  be 
tween  Fort  Sumter  and  St.  Philip's  spire  shows  a  clear 
fairway  all  the  distance  up  to  the  wharves  of  Charleston. 

There  are  other  great  churches  of  Charleston  —  some 
of  them  very  handsome  and  with  a  deal  of  local  history 
clustering  about  them,  but  perhaps  none  of  these  can 
approach  in  interest  the  Huguenot  edifice  at  the  corner 
of  Queen  and  Church  streets.  It  is  a  little  church,  mod 
estly  disdaining  such  a  worldly  thing  as  a  spire,  in  a 
crumbling  churchyard  whose  tombstones  have  their  in 
scriptions  written  in  French.  A  few  folk  find  their  way 
to  it  on  Sunday  mornings  and  there  they  listen  atten 
tively  to  its  scholarly  blind  preacher,  for  sixty  years  the 
leader  of  his  little  flock.  But  this  little  chapel  is  the 
sole  flame  of  a  famous  old  faith,  which  still  burns,  albeit 
ever  so  faintly,  in  the  blackness  and  the  shadow  of  the 
New  World. 

That  is  the  real  Charleston  —  the  unexpected  confront 
ing  you  at  almost  every  turn  of  its  quiet  streets:  here 
across  from  the  shrine  of  the  Huguenots  a  ruinous  build 
ing  through  which  white  and  negro  children  play  together 
democratically  and  at  will,  and  which  in  its  day  was  the 
Planters'  Hotel  and  a  hostelry  to  be  reckoned  with ;  down 
another  byway  a  tiny  remnant  of  the  city's  one-time  wall 
in  the  form  of  a  powder  magazine;  over  in  Meeting 
street  the  attenuated  market  with  a  Greek  temple  of  a 
hall  set  upon  one  end  and  the  place  where  they  sold  the 
slaves  still  pointed  out  to  folk  from  the  North;  farther 
down  on  Meeting  street  the  hall  of  the  South  Carolina 
Society,  a  really  exquisite  aged  building  wherein  that 
distinguished  old-time  organization  together  with  its  still 
older  brother,  the  St.  Andrews,  still  dines  on  an  ap- 


150     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

pointed  day  each  month  and  whose  polished  ballroom 
floor  has  felt  the  light  dance-falls  of  the  St.  Cecilias. 

"  The  St.  Cecilia  Society  ?  "  you  interrupt ;  "  why,  I've 
heard  of  that." 

Of  course  you  have.  For  the  St.  Cecilia  typifies 
Charleston  —  the  social  life  of  the  place,  which  is  all 
there  is  left  to  it  since  her  monumental  tragedy  of  half 
a  century  ago.  In  Charleston  there  is  no  middle  ground. 

You  are  either  recognized  socially  —  or  else  you  are 
not.  And  the  St.  Cecilia  Society  is  the  sharply-drawn 
dividing  point.  Established  somewhere  before  the  be 
ginning  of  the  Revolution  it  has  dominated  Charleston 
society  these  many  years.  Invitations  to  its  three  balls 
each  year  are  eagerly  sought  by  all  the  feminine  folk 
within  the  town.  And  the  privilege  of  being  invited  to 
these  formal  affairs  is  never  to  be  scorned  —  more  often 
it  is  the  cause  of  many  heart-burnings. 

No  one  thing  shows  Charleston  the  more  clearly  than 
the  fact  that  on  the  following  morning  you  may  search 
the  columns  of  the  venerable  News  and  Courier  almost 
in  vain  for  a  notice  of  the  St.  Cecilia  ball.  In  any  other 
town  an  event  of  such  importance  would  be  a  task  indeed 
for  the  society  editor  and  all  of  her  sub-editresses.  If 
there  was  not  a  flashlight  photograph  there  would  be  the 
description  of  the  frocks  —  a  list  of  the  out-of-town 
guests  at  any  rate.  Charleston  society  does  not  concede 
a  single  one  of  these  things.  And  the  most  the  News 
and  Courier  ever  prints  is  "  The  ball  of  the  St.  Cecilia 
Society  was  held  last  evening  at  Hibernian  Hall,"  or  a 
two-line  notice  of  similar  purport. 

Charleston  society  concedes  little  or  nothing  —  not 
even  these  new-fashioned  meal  hours  of  the  upstart 
Northern  towns.  In  Charleston  a  meal  each  four  hours 
—  breakfast  at  eight,  a  light  lunch  at  sharp  noon,  dinner 
at  four,  supper  again  at  eight.  These  hours  were  good 
enough  for  other  days  —  ergo,  they  are  good  enough  for 


CHARLESTON  151 

these.  And  from  eleven  to  two  and  again  from  five  to 
seven-thirty  remain  the  smart  calling  hours  among  the 
elect  of  the  place.  Those  great  houses  do  not  yield  read 
ily  to  the  Present. 

Charleston  society  is  never  democratic  —  no  matter 
how  Charleston  politics  may  run.  Its  great  houses,  be 
hind  the  exclusion  of  those  high  and  forbidding  walls,  are 
tightly  closed  to  such  strangers  as  come  without  the  right 
marks  of  identification.  From  without  you  may  breathe 
the  hints  of  old  mahogany,  of  fine  silver  and  china,  of 
impeccable  linen,  of  well-trained  servants,  but  your  imag 
ination  must  meet  the  every  test  as  to  the  details.  Gen 
tility  does  not  flaunt  herself.  And  if  the  younger  girls 
of  Charleston  society  do  drive  their  motor  cars  pleasant 
mornings  through  the  crowded  shopping  district  of  King 
street,  that  does  not  mean  that  Charleston  —  the  Charles 
ton  of  the  barouche  and  the  closed  coupe  —  will  ever 
approve. 

On  the  April  day  half  a  century  ago  that  the  first  gun 
blazed  defiantly  from  Fort  Sumter  and  opened  a  page  of 
history  that  bade  fair  to  alter  the  very  course  of  things, 
Prosperity  slipped  out  of  Charleston.  Gentility,  Cour 
age,  Romance  alone  remained.  Prosperity  with  her  giant 
steamships  and  her  long  railroad  trains  never  returned. 
The  great  docks  along  the  front  of  the  splendid  harbor 
stand  unused,  the  warehouses  upon  them  molder.  A 
brisk  Texas  town  upon  a  sand-spit  —  Galveston  —  boasts 
that  she  is  the  second  ocean-port  of  America,  with  the 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  Texas  acres  turned  from  graz 
ing  ranges  into  cotton-field,  just  behind  her.  New  Or 
leans  is  the  south  gate  of  the  Middle  West  that  has  come 
into  existence,  since  Charleston  faced  her  greatest  of 
tragedies.  And  the  docks  along  her  waterfront  grow 
rusty  with  disuse. 

She  lives  in  her  yesterdays  of  triumphs.     Tell  her  that 


152     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

they  have  builded  a  tower  in  New  York  that  is  fifty-five 
stories  in  height,  and  she  will  reply  that  you  can  still  see 
the  house  in  Church  street  where  President  Washington 
was  entertained  in  royal  fashion  by  her  citizens ;  hint  to 
her  of  the  great  canal  to  the  south,  and  she  will  ask  you 
if  you  remember  how  the  blockade  runners  slipped  night 
after  night  through  the  tight  chain  that  the  Federal  gun 
boats  drew  across  the  entrance  of  her  harbor  for  four 
long  years;  bespeak  into  her  ears  the  social  glories  of 
the  great  hotels  and  the  opera  of  New  York,  and  she  will 
tell  you  of  the  gentle  French  and  English  blood  that  went 
into  the  making  of  her  first  families.  Charleston  has  lost 
nothing.  For  what  is  Prosperity,  she  may  ask  you,  but 
a  dollar-mark  ?  Romance  and  Courtesy  are  without  price. 
Romance  and  Courtesy  still  walk  in  her  streets,  in  the 
hot  and  lazy  summer  days,  in  the  brilliancy  of  the  south 
ern  moon  beating  down  upon  her  graceful  guarding 
spires,  in  the  thunder  of  the  storm  and  the  soft  gray 
blankets  of  the  ocean  mantling  her  houses  and  her  gar 
dens.  And  Romance  and  Courtesy  do  not  forget. 


9 

ROCHESTER  — AND  HER  NEIGHBORS 

THE  three  great  cities  of  western  New  York  — 
Syracuse,  Rochester,  Buffalo  —  are  like  jewels  to 
the  famous  railroad  along  which  they  are  strung,  and 
effectively  they  serve  to  offset  the  great  metropolitan 
district  at  the  east  end  of  the  state.  They  have  many 
things  in  common  and  yet  they  are  not  in  the  least  alike. 
Their  growth  has  been  due  to  virtually  a  common  cause ; 
the  development  of  transportation  facilities  across  New 
York  state ;  and  yet  their  personality  is  as  varied  as  that 
of  three  sisters ;  lovely  but  different. 

Of  the  three,  Rochester  is  the  most  distinctive ;  one  of 
the  most  distinctive  of  all  our  American  towns  and  hence 
chosen  as  the  chief  subject  for  this  chapter.  But  Buffalo 
is  the  largest,  and  Syracuse  the  most  ingenious,  so 
they  are  not  to  be  ignored.  Rochester  is  conservative. 
Rochester  proves  her  conservatism  by  her  smart  clubs, 
and  the  general  cultivation  of  her  inhabitants.  Certain 
excellent  persons  there,  like  certain  excellent  persons  in 
Charleston,  frown  upon  newspaper  reports  of  their  social 
activities.  In  Syracuse,  on  the  contrary,  the  Sunday 
newspapers  have  columns  of  "  society  notes "  and  the 
reporters  who  go  to  dances  and  receptions  prove  their 
industry  by  writing  long  lists  of  the  "  among  those  pres 
ent."  Buffalo  leans  more  to  Syracuse  custom  in  this 
regard.  Rochester  scans  rather  critically  the  man  who 
comes  to  dwell  there  —  unless  he  comes  labeled  with  let 
ters  of  introduction.  In  Syracuse  and  in  Buffalo,  too, 
there  is  more  of  a  spirit  of  camaraderie.  A  man  is  taken 

153 


154     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

into  good  society  there  because  of  what  he  is,  rather  than 
for  that  from  which  he  may  have  sprung.  So  it  may  be 
said  that  Syracuse  and  Buffalo  breathe  the  spirit  of  the 
West  in  their  social  life,  while  Rochester  clings  firmly  to 
the  conservatism  of  the  East.  Indeed,  her  citizens  rather 
like  to  call  her  "  the  Boston  of  the  West,"  just  as  the 
man  from  the  Missouri  Bottoms  called  the  real  Boston 
"  the  Omaha  of  the  East." 

Take  these  cities  separately  and  their  personality 
becomes  the  more  pertinent  and  compelling.  Consider 
them  one  by  one  as  a  traveler  sees  them  on  a  west 
bound  train  of  the  New  York  Central  railroad  —  Syra 
cuse,  Rochester,  Buffalo  —  and  in  the  same  grading  they 
increase  in  population;  roughly  speaking,  in  a  geomet 
rical  ratio.  Syracuse  has  a  little  more  than  a  hundred 
thousand  inhabitants,  Rochester  is  about  twice  her  size 
and  Buffalo  is  about  twice  the  size  of  Rochester. 

Each  of  them  is  the  result  of  the  Erie  canal.  There 
had  been  famous  post-roads  across  central  and  western 
New  York  before  DeWitt  Clinton  dug  his  great  ditch, 
and  the  Mohawk  valley  together  with  the  little  known 
"  lake  country  "  of  New  York  formed  one  of  the  earliest 
passage-ways  to  the  West.  But  the  Erie  canal,  providing 
a  water  level  from  the  Great  Lakes  to  the  Hudson  river 
and  so  to  the  Atlantic,  was  a  tremendous  impulse  to  the 
state  of  New  York.  Small  towns  grew  apace  and  the 
three  big  towns  were  out  of  their  swaddling  clothes  and 
accounted  as  cities  almost  before  they  realized  it.  The 
building  of  the  railroads  across  the  state  and  their  merg 
ing  into  great  systems  was  a  second  step  in  their  transi 
tion,  while  the  third  can  hardly  be  said  to  be  completed 

—  the  planning  and  construction  of  a  network  of  inter- 
urban  electric  lines  that  shall  again  unite  the  three  and 

—  what  is  far  more  important  to  each  —  bring  a  great 
territory  of  small  cities,  villages  and  rich  farms  into  closer 
touch  with  them. 


MHBB 


\ 


156     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

you  will  remember  they  used  years  ago  to  stretch  ropes 
across  the  streets  in  front  of  the  churches  at  service 
times.  But  imagine  the  possibilities  of  that  sort  of  thing 
in  New  York,  or  Chicago,  or  San  Francisco. 

Syracuse  is  famed  for  the  Onondaga  Indians  and  for 
James  Roscoe  Day.  The  Onondaga  Indians  are  the  old 
est  inhabitants,  and  a  great  help  to  the  ingenious  local 
artists  who  design  cigar-box  labels.  No  apologies  are 
needed  for  Chancellor  Day.  He  has  never  asked  them. 
He  has  taken  a  half-baked  Methodist  college  that  stood 
on  a  wind-swept  and  barren  hill  and  by  his  indomitable 
ability  and  Simon-pure  genius  has  transformed  it  into 
a  real  university.  For  Syracuse  University  is  tremen 
dously  real  to  the  four  thousand  men  and  women  who 
study  within  its  halls.  It  is  a  poor  man's  college  and 
Chancellor  Day  is  proud  of  that.  They  come,  these  four 
thousand  men  and  women,  from  the  small  cities  and  vil 
lages,  from  the  farms  of  that  which  the  metropolitan  is 
rather  apt  indifferently  to  term  "  Up  State."  To  these, 
four  years  in  a  university  mean  four  years  of  cultivation 
and  opportunity,  and  so  has  come  the  growth,  the  vast 
hidden  power  of  the  institution  upon  the  hill  at  Syracuse. 
She  makes  no  claim  to  college  spirit  of  surpassing  di 
mensions.  She  does  claim  individual  spirit  among  her 
students,  however,  that  is  second  to  none.  As  a  univer 
sity  —  as  some  know  a  university  —  the  collection  of  ill- 
matched  architectural  edifices  that  house  her  is  typical; 
but  as  an  opportunity  for  popular  education  to  the  boys 
and  girls  of  the  rural  districts  of  the  state  of  New  York 
she  is  monumental,  and  they  come  swarming  to  her  in 
greater  numbers  each  autumn. 

So  much  for  the  hill  —  they  call  it  Mount  Olympus  — 
which  holds  the  university  and  those  things  that  are  the 
university's.  Now  for  downtown  Syracuse;  for  while 
the  city's  newer  districts  are  ranged  upon  a  series  of 


ROCHESTER  —  SYRACUSE  —  BUFFALO   157 

impressive  heights,  her  old  houses,  her  stores  and  her 
factories  are  squatted  upon  the  flats  at  the  head  of 
Onondaga  lake. 

We  all  remember  the  pictures  of  Syracuse  that  every 
self-respecting  geography  used  to  print;  salt-sheds  run 
ning  off  over  an  indefinite  acreage.  We  were  given  to 
understand  that  Syracuse's  chief  excuse  for  existence 
was  as  a  sort  of  huge  salt-cellar  for  the  rest  of  the  nation. 
Nowadays  nine-tenths  of  the  Syracusans  have  forgotten 
that  there  is  a  salt  industry  left,  and  will  tell  you  glibly 
of  the  typewriters,  automobiles,  steel-tubing  and  the  like 
that  are  made  in  their  town  in  the  course  of  a  twelve 
month. 

They  will  not  tell  you  of  one  thing,  for  of  that  thing 
you  may  judge  yourself.  Life  in  Syracuse  is  punctuated 
by  the  railroad  and  the  canal.  The  canal  is  not  so  much 
of  an  obstruction  unless  one  of  the  cumbersome  lift- 
bridges  sticks  and  refuses  to  move  up  or  down,  but  that 
railroad !  Every  few  minutes  life  in  Syracuse  comes  to 
an  actual  standstill  because  of  it.  Men  whose  time  is 
worth  ten  or  fifteen  dollars  an  hour  and  who  grow  puffy 
with  over-exertion  are  violently  halted  by  the  passing 
of  switch-engines  with  trails  of  box-cars.  Appointments 
are  missed.  Board  meetings  at  the  banks  halt  for  direc 
tors  —  directors  who  are  halted  in  their  turn  by  the  dig 
nified  and  stately  passage  of  the  Canastota  Local  through 
the  heart  of  the  city. 

But  the  old  canal  is  going  to  go  some  day  —  when  the 
State's  new  barge  canal  well  to  the  north  of  the  town  is 
completed  —  and  perhaps  in  that  same  day  Syracuse  will 
have  a  broad,  central  avenue  replacing  the  present  dirty, 
foul-smelling  ditch.  Some  day,  some  very  big  Syracusan 
will  miss  an  appointment  while  he  stands  in  Salina  street 
watching  the  serene  Canastota  Local  drag  its  way  past 
him.  That  missed  appointment  will  cost  the  very  big 
Syracusan  a  lot  of  money  and  there  will  be  a  revolution 


158     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

in  Syracuse  —  a  railroad  revolution.  After  that  the  loco 
motives  will  no  longer  blow  their  smoky  breaths  against 
the  fronts  of  Syracuse's  best  buildings  and  grind  their 
way  slowly  down  Washington  street  from  the  tunnel  to 
the  depot,  for  the  railroad  which  operates  them  stands 
in  the  forefront  of  the  progressive  transportation  systems 
of  America,  and  it  is  only  waiting  for  Syracuse  to  take 
the  first  definite  step  of  progress.  Some  day  Syracuse 
—  Syracuse  delayed  —  is  going  to  take  that  step.  Only 
a  year  or  two  ago  the  Chicago  Limited  held  up  the  carni 
val  parade  —  and  therein  lies  the  final  paragraph  of  this 
telling  of  Syracuse. 

She  is  a  festive  lass.  Each  September  she  rolls  up  her 
sleeves,  her  business  men  swell  the  subscription  lists,  her 
matrons  and  her  pretty  girls  bestir  themselves,  and  there 
is  a  concert  of  action  that  gives  Syracuse  a  harvest  week 
long  to  be  remembered.  By  day  folk  go  out  to  the  State 
Fair  and  see  the  best  agricultural  show  that  New  York 
state  has  ever  known  —  a  veritable  agricultural  show  that 
endeavors  not  only  to  furnish  an  ample  measure  of  fun, 
but  also  endeavors  to  be  a  real  help  to  the  progressive 
owners  of  those  rich  farms  of  central  and  western  New 
York.  By  night  Syracuse  is  in  festival.  Do  not  let  them 
tell  you  that  an  American  town  cannot  enter  into  the 
carnival  spirit  and  still  preserve  her  graciousness  and  a 
certain  underlying  sense  of  decorum.  Tell  those  scoffers 
to  go  to  Syracuse  during  the  week  of  the  State  Fair. 
They  will  see  a  demonstration  of  the  contrary  —  Salina 
street  ablaze  with  an  incandescent  beauty,  lined  with  row 
upon  row  of  eager  citizens.  The  street  is  cleared  to  a 
broad  strip  of  stone  carpet  down  its  center  and  over  this 
carpet  rolls  float  after  float.  These  in  a  single  year  will 
symbolize  a  single  thing.  In  one  September  we  recall 
that  they  represented  the  nations  of  the  world  and  that 
the  Queen  of  Ancient  Ireland  wore  eyeglasses;  but  that 
is  as  nothing,  the  policemen  in  Boston  are  addicted  to 


ROCHESTER  —  SYRACUSE  —  BUFFALO   159 

straighteners,  and  Mr.  Syracuse  and  Mrs.  Syracuse,  Miss 
Syracuse  and  Master  Syracuse  stand  open-eyed  in 
pleasure  and  go  home  very  late  at  night  on  trolley  cars 
that  are  as  crowded  as  the  trolley  cars  in  very  big  cities, 
convinced  that  there  possibly  may  be  other  towns  but 
there  is  only  one  Syracuse.* 

All  of  which  is  exactly  as  it  should  be.  Syracuse's 
great  hope  for  her  future  rests  in  just  such  optimism  on 
the  part  of  her  people.  And  in  such  optimism  she  has  a 
strong  foundation  on  which  to  build  through  coming 
years. 

Buffalo  is  not  as  frivolous  as  Syracuse.  She  cares  but 
little  for  festivals  but  speaks  of  herself  in  the  cold  com 
mercial  terms  of  success.  If  you  have  ever  met  a  man 
from  Buffalo,  when  you  were  traveling,  and  he  began  to 
tell  you  of  his  town,  you  will  know  exactly  what  we 
mean.  He  undoubtedly  began  by  quoting  marvelous  sta 
tistics,  some  of  them  concerning  the  number  of  trains 
that  arrived  and  departed  from  his  native  heath  in  the 
course  of  twenty-four  hours.  When  he  was  through, 
you  had  a  confused  idea  that  Buffalo  was  some  sort  of 
an  exaggerated  railroad  yard,  where  you  changed  cars 
to  go  from  any  one  corner  of  the  universe  to  any  other 
corner.  When  your  time  came  to  see  Buffalo  for  your 
self,  that  confused  idea  returned  to  you.  Your  train 
slipped  for  miles  through  an  apparently  unending  wilder 
ness  of  branching  tracks  and  dusty  freight  cars,  past 
grimy  round-houses  and  steaming  locomotives,  until  you 
were  ready  to  believe  that  any  conceivable  number  of 
trains  arrived  at  and  departed  from  that  busy  town  within 
a  single  calendar  day. 

*  Let  it  be  recorded  in  the  interest  of  accuracy  that  the  fall  festi 
val  of  1913  was  not  given  —  much  to  the  disappointment  of  Mr. 
Syracuse,  Mrs.  Syracuse,  Miss  Syracuse  and  Master  Syracuse. 
It  is  hoped,  however,  that  the  festival  has  not  been  permanently 
abandoned.  The  loss  of  its  influence  would  be  felt  far  outside 
of  Syracuse.  E.  H. 


160     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

If  you  have  approached  her  by  water  in  the  summer 
time  you  have  seen  her  as  a  mighty  port,  her  congestioi 
of  water  traffic  suggesting  salt  water  rather  than  fresh 
When  we  come  to  visit  the  neighboring  port  of  Cleve 
land  we  shall  give  heed  to  the  wonderful  traffic  of  the  in 
land  seas,  but  for  this  moment  consider  Buffalo  as  some 
thing  more  than  a  railroad  yard,  a  busy  harbor,  or  even  z 
melting-pot  for  the  fusing  of  as  large  and  as  difficult  c 
foreign  element  as  is  given  to  any  American  town  to  fuse 
Consider  Buffalo  dreaming  metropolitan  dreams.  Th( 
dull  roar  of  Niagara,  almost  infinite  in  its  possibilities  oi 
power,  is  within  hearing.  That  dull  roar  has  been  Buf 
falo's  incentive,  the  lullaby  which  induced  her  dreams  oi 
industrial  as  well  as  of  commercial  strength.  And  mud 
has  been  written  of  her  growing  strength  in  these  greal 
lines. 

To  our  own  minds  the  real  Buffalo  is  to  be  found  in 
her  typical  citizen.  If  he  is  really  typical  of  the  city  al 
the  west  gate  of  the  Empire  state,  you  will  find  him  opti 
mistic  and  energetic  to  a  singular  degree,  and  he  needs 
all  his  optimism  and  his  energy  to  combat  the  problems 
that  come  to  a  town  of  exceeding  growth,  just  crossing 
the  threshold  of  metropolitanism.  Those  problems  de 
mand  cool  heads  and  stout  hearts.  Buffalo  is  just  begin 
ning  to  appreciate  that.  It  is  becoming  less  difficult  than 
of  old  for  them  to  pull  together,  to  dig  deep  into  their 
purses  if  need  be,  and  to  plan  their  city  of  tomorrow  in 
a  generous  spirit  of  cooperation. 

The  Buffalonians  have  a  full  measure  of  enjoyment 
in  their  city.  They  are  intensely  proud  of  it  and  right 
fully  —  do  not  forget  the  man  who  once  told  you  of  the 
number  of  railroad  trains  within  twenty-four  hours  — 
and  they  are  thoroughly  happy  in  and  around  it.  Niagara 
Falls  and  a  half-dozen  of  lake  beaches  on  Erie  and  On 
tario  are  within  easy  reach,  while  nearer  still  is  the  lovely 
park  of  the  town  —  which  a  goodly  corner  of  America 


ROCHESTER  —  SYRACUSE  —  BUFFALO   161 

remembers  as  the  site  of  the  Pan-American  Exposition, 
in  1901.  The  Buffalonians  live  much  of  the  time  out 
doors,  and  that  holds  true  whether  they  are  able  to  pat 
ronize  their  country  clubs  or  the  less  pretentious  suburban 
resorts.  They  play  at  golf,  at  baseball,  at  football,  and 
in  the  long  hard  winter  months  at  basketball  and  hockey 
and  bowling.  They  organize  teams  in  all  these  sports 
—  and  some  others  —  and  then  go  down  to  Rochester 
and  enter  into  amiable  contests  with  the  folks  who  live 
by  the  Genesee.  Syracuse,  too,  comes  into  the  fray  and 
these  three  cities  of  the  western  end  of  the  state  of  New 
York  fight  out  their  natural  and  healthy  rivalry  in  series 
upon  series  of  sturdy  athletic  championships.  The  bond 
between  them  is  really  very  close  indeed. 

Rochester  stands  halfway  between  Syracuse  and  Buf 
falo  and  as  we  have  already  said,  is  different  from  both 
of  them.  One  difference  is  apparent  even  to  the  man 
who  does  not  alight  from  his  through  train.  For  no 
railroad  has  dared  to  thrust  itself  down  a  main  busi 
ness  street  in  Rochester ;  in  fact  she  was  one  of  the  very 
first  cities  in  America  to  remove  the  deadly  grade  cross 
ings  from  her  avenues,  and  incalculable  fatalities  and 
near  fatalities  have  been  prevented  by  her  wisdom. 
Many  years  ago  she  placed  the  main  line  of  the  New  York 
Central  railroad,  which  crosses  close  to  her  heart,  upon 
a  great  viaduct.  When  that  viaduct  was  built,  a  great 
change  came  upon  the  town.  The  old  depot,  with  its 
vaulted  wooden  roof  clearing  both  tracks  and  street  and 
anchored  in  the  walls  of  the  historic  Brackett  House ;  with 
its  ancient  white  horse  switching  the  cars  of  earlier  days 
(as  it  is  years  and  years  and  years  since  that  white  horse 
went  to  graze  in  heavenly  meadows)  vanished  from  sight, 
and  a  great  stone-lined  embankment  —  high  enough  and 
thick  enough  to  be  a  city  wall  —  appeared,  as  if  by  magic, 
while  Rochester  reveled  in  a  vast  new  station,  big  enough 


162     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

and  fine  enough  for  all  time.  At  least  that  was  the  way 
the  station  seemed  when  it  was  first  built  in  1882.  But 
alas,  for  restless  America!  They  have  begun  to  tear 
the  old  station  down  as  this  is  being  written  —  a  larger 
and  still  finer  structure  replaces  it.  And  the  folk  who 
pray  for  the  conservatism  of  our  feverish  American 
energy  are  praying  that  it  will  last  more  than  thirty-one 
years ! 

But  in  just  this  way  Rochester  has  grown  apace  and 
quite  ahead  of  the  facilities  which  her  earlier  generations 
thought  would  be  abundant  for  all  time.  The  high  civic 
standard  that  forced  the  great  railroad  improvement  in 
the  earlier  days  when  most  American  towns,  like  Topsy, 
were  "  jus'  growin'  "  and  giving  little  thought  for  the 
morrow,  made  Rochester  different.  It  made  her  seek  to 
better  her  water  supply  and  in  this  she  succeeded,  tap 
ping  a  spring  pure  lake  forty  miles  back  in  the  high  hills 
and  bringing  its  contents  to  her  by  a  far-reaching  aque 
duct.  It  was  a  large  undertaking  for  a  small  city  of  the 
earlier  days,  but  the  small  city  was  plucky  and  it  today 
possesses  a  water  supply  that  is  second  to  none.  That 
same  early  placed  high  civic  standard  made  fireproof 
buildings  an  actuality  in  Rochester,  years  in  advance  of 
other  towns  of  the  same  size. 

That  civic  standard  has  worked  wonders  for  the  town 
by  the  falls  of  the  Genesee.  For  one  thing  it  has 
made  her  prolific  in  propaganda  of  one  sort  or  another. 
Strange  religious  sects  have  come  to  light  within  her 
boundaries.  Spiritualism  was  one  of  these,  for  it  was 
in  Rochester  that  the  famed  Fox  sisters  heard  the  myste 
rious  rappings,  and  it  was  only  a  little  way  outside  the 
town  where  Joseph  Smith  asserted  that  he  found  the 
Book  of  Mormon  and  so  brought  a  new  church  into  ex 
istence.  And  the  ladies  who  are  conducting  the  "  Votes 
for  Women  "  campaign  with  such  ardor  should  not  for 
get  that  it  was  in  Rochester  that  Susan  B.  Anthony  lived 


ROCHESTER  —  SYRACUSE  —  BUFFALO   163 

for  long  years  of  her  life,  working  not  alone  for  the 
cause  that  was  close  to  her  heart,  but  in  every  way  for 
the  good  of  the  town  that  meant  so  much  to  her. 

Perhaps  the  most  interesting  phases  of  the  Rochester 
civic  standard  are  those  that  have  worked  inwardly. 
She  has  a  new  city  plan  —  of  course.  What  modern  city 
has  not  dreamed  these  glowing  things,  of  transforming 
ugly  squares  into  plazas  of  European  magnificence,  of 
making  dingy  Main  and  State  streets  into  boulevards? 
And  who  shall  say  that  such  dreams  are  idly  dreamed? 
Rochester  is  not  dreaming  idly.  She  has  already  con 
ceived  a  wonderful  new  City  Hall,  to  spring  upwards 
from  her  Main  street,  but  what  is  perhaps  more  interest 
ing  to  her  casual  visitors  in  her  new  plan  is  the  archi 
tectural  recognition  that  it  gives  to  the  Genesee.  The 
Genesee  is  a  splendid  river  —  in  many  ways  not  unlike 
the  more  famous  Niagara.  You  have  already  known 
the  part  it  has  played  in  the  making  of  Rochester.  Yet 
the  city  has  seen  fit,  apparently,  to  all  but  ignore  it. 
Main  street  —  for  Rochester  is  a  famous  one-street  town 
—  crosses  it  on  a  solid  stone  bridge  but  that  bridge  is 
lined  with  buildings,  like  the  prints  you  used  to  see  of 
old  London  bridge.  None  of  the  folk  who  walk  that 
famous  thoroughfare  ever  see  the  river.  In  the  new 
scheme  the  old  rookeries  that  hang  upon  the  edge  of 
Main  street  bridge  are  to  be  torn  away  and  the  river  is 
to  come  into  its  own.  And  Rochester  folk  feel  that  that 
day  can  come  none  too  soon. 

But  the  Rochester  civic  standard  has  worked  no  better 
for  her  than  in  social  reforms.  The  phases  of  these  are 
far  too  many  to  be  enumerated  here,  but  one  of  them 
stands  forth  too  sharply  to  be  ignored.  A  few  years  ago 
some  Rochesterian  conceived  the  idea  of  making  the 
schools  work  nights  as  well  as  day.  He  had  studied  the 
work  of  the  settlement  houses  in  the  larger  cities,  and 
while  Rochester  had  no  such  slums  as  called  for  settle- 


164     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

ment  houses  it  did  have  a  large  population  that  demanded 
some  interest  and  attention.  For  instance,  within  the 
past  few  years  a  large  number  of  Italians  have  come 
there,  and  although  they  present  no  such  difficult  fusing 
problem  as  the  Jews  of  New  York,  the  Polaks  of  Buf 
falo  or  the  Huns  of  Pittsburgh,  it  is  not  the  Rochester 
way  to  ignore  in  the  larger  social  sense  any  of  the  folk 
who  come  to  her. 

"  We  will  make  the  school-houses  into  clubs,  we  will 
make  them  open  forums  where  people  can  come  evenings 
and  get  a  little  instruction,  a  little  more  entertainment,  but 
best  of  all  can  speak  their  minds  freely,"  said  this  enthu 
siast.  "  We  will  broaden  out  the  idea  of  the  ward  clubs." 

The  ward  clubs  to  which  he  referred  were  neat  and 
attractive  structures  situated  in  residential  parts  of  the 
town,  where  folk  who  lived  in  their  own  neat  homes  and 
who  earned  from  three  to  eight  thousand  dollars  a  year 
gather  for  their  dances,  their  bridges,  their  small  lectures 
and  the  like.  The  enthusiast  proposed  to  enlarge  this 
idea,  by  the  simple  process  of  opening  the  school-houses 
evenings.  His  idea  was  immensely  popular  from  the 
first.  And  within  a  very  few  weeks  it  was  in  process  of 
fruition.  The  school-houses  —  they  called  them  "  Social 
Centers  " —  were  opened  and  night  after  night  they  were 
filled.  It  looked  as  if  Rochester  had  launched  another 
pretty  big  idea  upon  the  world. 

That  idea,  however,  has  been  radically  changed,  today. 
One  of  the  professors  of  the  local  university  threw  him 
self  into  it,  possibly  with  more  enthusiasm  than  judgment, 
and  was  reported  in  the  local  prints  as  having  said  that 
the  red  flag  might  be  carried  in  street  parades  along  with 
the  Stars  and  Stripes.  That  settled  it.  Rochester  is  a 
pretty  conservative  town,  and  its  folk  who  live  quietly 
in  its  great  houses  sat  up  and  took  notice  of  the  profes 
sor's  remarks.  Those  great  houses  had  smiled  rather 
complacently  at  the  pretty  experiment  in  the  schools. 


ROCHESTER  —  SYRACUSE  —  BUFFALO   165 

Of  a  sudden  they  decided  that  they  were  being  trans 
formed  into  incubators  for  the  making  of  socialists  or  of 
anarchists  —  great  houses  do  not  make  very  discerning 
discriminations. 

The  professor  had  kicked  over  the  boat.  A  powerful 
church  which  has  taken  a  very  definite  stand  against 
Socialism  joined  with  the  great  houses.  The  question 
was  brought  into  local  politics.  The  professor  lost  his 
job  out  at  the  university,  and  the  school-houses  ceased  to 
be  open  forums.  Today  they  are  called  "  Recreation 
Centers  "  and  are  content  with  instruction  and  entertain 
ment,  but  the  full  breadth  of  the  idea  they  started  has 
swept  across  the  country  and  many  cities  of  the  mid- 
West  and  the  West  are  adopting  it. 

The  Rochester  way  of  doing  things  is  a  very  good  way, 
indeed.  For  instance,  the  city  decided  a  few  years  ago 
that  it  ought  to  have  a  fair.  It  had  been  many  years 
since  it  had  had  an  annual  fair,  and  it  saw  Syracuse  and 
Toronto  each  year  becoming  greater  magnets  because  of 
their  exhibitions.  Straightway  Rochester  decided  that 
it  would  have  some  sort  of  fall  show,  just  what  sort  was 
a  bit  of  a  problem  at  first.  It  wanted  something  far 
bigger  than  a  county  fair,  and  yet  it  could  hardly  ask 
the  state  for  aid  when  the  state  had  spent  so  much  on  its 
own  show  in  nearby  Syracuse. 

Then  it  was  that  Rochester  decided  to  dig  down  into  its 
own  pockets.  It  saw  a  fortunate  opening  just  ahead. 
The  state  in  abandoning  a  penal  institution  had  left  four 
teen  or  fifteen  acres  of  land  within  a  mile  of  the  center 
of  the  city  —  the  famous  Four  Corners.  The  city  took 
that  land,  tore  down  the  great  stone  wall  that  had  en 
circled  it,  erected  some  new  buildings  and  transformed 
some  of  the  older  ones,  created  a  park  of  the  entire  prop 
erty  and  announced  that  it  was  going  in  the  show  busi 
ness,  itself.  It  has  gone  into  the  show  business  and  suc 
ceeded.  The  Rochester  Exposition  is  as  much  a  part 


i66     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

of  the  city  organization  as  its  park  board  or  its  health 
department.  Throughout  the  greater  part  of  the  year 
the  show-grounds  are  a  public  park,  holding  a  museum 
of  local  history  that  is  not  to  be  despised.  And  for  two 
weeks  in  each  September  it  comes  into  its  own  —  a  great, 
dignified  show,  builded  not  of  wood  and  staff  so  as  to 
make  a  memorable  season  and  then  be  forgotten,  but 
builded  of  steel  and  stone  and  concrete  for  both  beauty 
and  permanency. 

"  Now  what  are  the  things  that  have  gone  to  make 
these  things  possible  ? "  you  are  beginning  to  say. 
"  What  is  the  nature  of  the  typical  Rochesterian  ?  " 

Putting  the  thing  the  wrong  way  about  we  should  say 
that  the  typical  Rochesterian  is  pretty  near  the  typical 
American.  And  still  continuing  in  the  reversed  order  of 
things  consider,  for  an  instant,  the  beginnings  of  Roches 
ter.  We  have  spoken  of  these  three  cities  of  the  western 
end  of  New  York  state  as  the  first  fruit  of  the  wonder 
ful  Erie  canal.  That  is  quite  true  and  yet  it  is  also  true 
that  before  the  canal  came  there  was  quite  a  town  at  the 
falls  of  the  Genesee,  trying  in  crude  fashion  to  avail  itself 
of  the  wonderful  water-power.  And  while  the  canal  was 
still  an  unfinished  ditch,  three  men  rode  up  from  the 
south  —  Rochester  and  Fitzhugh  and  Carroll  —  and  sur 
veyed  a  city  to  replace  the  straggling  town.  That  little 
village  had,  during  the  ten  brief  years  of  its  existence, 
been  known  as  Falls  Town.  Col.  Rochester  gave  his 
own  name  to  the  city  that  he  foresaw  and  lived  to  see  it 
make  its  definite  beginnings.  All  that  was  in  the  third 
decade  of  the  last  century,  and  Rochester  has  yet  to 
celebrate  her  first  centenary  under  her  present  name. 

Her  career  divides  itself  into  three  epochs.  In  the 
first  of  these  —  from  the  days  of  her  settlement  up  to 
the  close  of  the  Civil  War  —  she  was  famed  for  her 
flouring-mills.  She  was  known  the  world  over  as  the 


ROCHESTER  —  SYRACUSE  —  BUFFALO   167 

Flour  City,  and  she  held  that  title  until  the  great  wheat 
farms  of  the  land  were  moved  far  to  the  west.  But  they 
still  continued  to  call  her  by  the  same  name  although 
they  spelled  it  differently  now  —  the  Flower  City.  For 
a  new  industry  arose  within  her.  America  was  awaken 
ing  to  a  quickened  sense  of  beauty.  Flowers  and  florists 
were  becoming  popular,  and  a  group  of  shrewd  men  in 
and  around  Rochester  made  the  nursery  business  into  a 
very  great  industry.  In  more  recent  years  the  nature 
of  her  manufactures  has  broadened  —  her  camera  fac 
tory  is  the  most  famous  in  all  the  world,  optical  goods, 
boots  and  shoes,  ready-made  clothing,  come  pouring  out 
of  her  in  a  great  tidal  stream  of  enterprise. 

She  is  an  industrial  city,  definitely  and  distinctly. 
Fortunately  she  is  an  industrial  city  employing  a  high 
grade  of  labor  almost  exclusively,  and  yet  none  the 
less  a  town  devoted  to  manufacturing.  Once  again,  do 
not  forget  that  she  has  not  neglected  her  social  life, 
and  you  may  read  this  as  you  please.  You  may  look 
away  from  the  broadening  work  of  the  ward  clubs  and 
of  the  school-houses  and  demand  if  there  is  an  aristoc 
racy  in  Rochester.  The  resident  of  the  town  will  lead 
you  over  into  its  Third  ward  —  a  compact  community 
almost  within  stone-throw  of  the  Four  Corners,  and  shut 
off  from  the  rest  of  the  vulgar  world  by  a  river,  a  canal 
and  a  railroad  yard.  In  that  compact  community,  its 
tree-lined  streets  suggesting  the  byways  of  some  tranquil 
New  England  community,  is  the  seat  of  Rochester  so 
cial  government.  The  residents  of  the  Third  ward  are 
a  neighborly  folk,  borrowing  things  of  one  another  and 
visiting  about  with  delightful  informality  among  them 
selves,  and  yet  their  rule  is  undisputed. 

East  avenue  —  the  great  show  street  of  Rochester  — 
feels  that  rule.  East  avenue  is  lined  with  great  houses, 
far  greater  houses  than  those  of  the  Third  ward  — 
many  of  them  built  with  the  profits  of  "  Kodak  "  stock 


i68     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

—  yet  East  avenue  represents  a  younger  generation,  a 
generation  which  seems  to  have  made  money  rather 
easily.  There  has  been  some  intermarriage  and  some 
letting  down  of  the  bars  between  the  ambitious  East 
avenue  and  the  dominant  Third  ward  —  but  not  much 
of  it.  Rochester  is  far  too  conservative  to  change  easily 
or  rapidly. 

She  is  proud  of  herself  as  she  is  —  and  rightly  so. 
Her  people  will  sing  of  her  charms  by  the  hours  —  and 
rightly  so,  again.  They  live  their  lives  and  live  them 
well.  For  when  all  is  said  and  done,  the  glory  of  Roch 
ester  is  not  in  her  public  buildings,  her  water-power, 
her  fair,  her  movements  toward  social  reform,  not  even 
in  her  parks  —  although  Rochester  parks  are  superb,  for 
Nature  has  been  their  chief  architect  and  she  has  ex 
ecuted  her  commission  in  splendid  fashion  —  nor  does 
it  reside  in  her  imposing  Main  street,  nor  in  her  vast 
manufactories  that  may  be  translated  into  stunning  ar 
rays  of  statistics  —  her  glory  is  in  her  homes.  The 
tenement,  as  we  know  it  in  the  big  cities,  and  the  city 
house,  with  its  dead  cold  walls,  are  practically  unknown 
there.  Apartment  houses  are  rarities  —  there  are  not 
more  than  twenty  or  thirty  in  the  town  —  and  conse 
quently  oddities.  Your  Rochesterian,  rich  and  poor, 
dwells  in  a  detached  house  on  his  own  tract  of  land ;  the 
chances  are  that  he  has  market-truck  growing  in  his  back 
yard,  a  real  kitchen-garden.  There  are  thousands  of 
these  little  homes  in  the  outlying  sections  of  the  town, 
with  more  pretentious  ones  lining  East  avenue  and  the 
other  more  elaborate  streets.  All  of  these  taken  together 
are  the  real  regulators  of  the  town.  For  the  citizens  of 
Rochester  are  less  governed  and  themselves  govern  more 
than  in  most  places  of  the  size.  That  is  the  value  of  the 
detached  house  to  the  city.  Detached  houses  in  a  city 
seem  to  mean  good  schools,  good  fire  and  police  service, 


ROCHESTER  —  SYRACUSE  —  BUFFALO   169 

clean  streets,  health  protection,  social  progress  —  Roch 
ester  has  all  of  these  in  profusion. 

East  avenue,  in  its  rather  luscious  beauty,  represents 
these  ideals  of  Rochester  on  dress  parade.  We  rather 
think,  however,  that  you  can  read  the  character  of  the 
town  better  in  the  side  streets.  Now  a  long  street,  filled 
with  somewhat  monotonous  rows  of  simple  frame  houses 
does  not  mean  much  at  a  glance  —  even  when  the  street 
is  parked  and  filled  for  a  mile  with  blossoming  magnolias, 
as  Oxford  street  in  Rochester  is  filled.  But  such  a 
street,  together  with  all  the  other  streets  of  its  sort, 
means  that  much  of  the  disappearing  charm  and  loveli 
ness  of  our  American  village  life  is  being  absorbed  right 
into  the  heart  of  a  community  of  goodly  size. 

Sometimes  citizens  from  other  towns  running  hard 
amuck  Rochester's  conservatism  call  her  provincial.  She 
has  clung  to  some  of  her  small  town  customs  longer  than 
her  neighbors,  but  of  late  she  has  attempted  metropoli- 
tanism  —  they  have  builded  two  big  new  hotels  in  the 
place,  and  the  radicals  have  dared  to  place  a  big  build 
ing  or  two  off  Main  street  —  quite  a  step  in  a  town  which 
has  become  famous  as  a  one-street  town. 

But  Rochester,  like  most  conservatives,  is  careless  of 
outside  criticism.  She  points  to  the  big  things  that  she 
has  accomplished.  She  shows  you  her  streets  of  the  de 
tached  houses  and  her  parks  —  perhaps  takes  you  down 
to  Genesee  Valley  Park  of  a  summer  night  when  carnival 
is  in  the  air  and  the  city's  band,  the  city's  very  own  bcmd, 
if  you  please,  is  playing  from  a  great  float  in  midstream, 
while  voices  from  two  or  three  thousand  gaily  decorated 
canoes  carry  the  melodies  a  long  way.  She  shows  you 
h^r  robust  glories,  the  fair  country  in  which  she  is  situate. 
For  miles  upon  miles  of  splendid  highways  surround  her, 
the  Genesee  indolent  for  a  time  above  the  Valley  Park 
appeals  to  the  man  with  a  canoe,  the  great  lake  to  the 


170     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

north  gives  favorable  breezes  to  the  yachtsman.  Do  you 
wonder  that  the  Rochesterians  know  that  they  dwell  in  a 
garden  land,  and  that  they  are  in  the  open  through  the 
fullness  of  a  summer  that  stretches  month  after  month, 
from  early  spring  to  late  autumn  ?  Do  you  wonder  that 
they  really  live  their  lives? 


10 

STEEL'S  GREAT  CAPITAL 

A  MAN,  traveling  across  the  land  for  the  very  first 
time,  slips  into  a  strange  town  —  after  dark.  It 
is  his  first  time  in  the  strange  town,  of  course.  Other 
wise  it  would  not  be  strange.  He  finds  his  hotel  with 
little  difficulty,  for  a  taxicab  takes  him  to  it.  He  im 
mediately  discovers  that  it  is  not  more  than  two  squares 
from  the  very  station  at  which  he  has  arrived.  Still  a 
friendly  taxicab  in  a  strange  town  is  not  an  institution 
at  which  to  scoff,  and  the  man  who  is  very  tired  is  glad 
to  get  into  his  hotel  room  and  to  bed  without  delay. 

He  awakes  the  next  morning  very  early  —  at  least  it 
must  be  very  early  for  it  is  still  dark.  It  is  dark  indeed 
as  he  stumbles  his  way  across  the  room  to  the  electric 
switch.  In  the  sudden  radiance  that  follows,  he  sput 
ters  at  himself  for  having  arisen  so  early  —  for  he  is 
a  man  fond  of  his  lazy  sleep  in  the  morning.  He  fum 
bles  in  his  pockets  and  finds  his  watch.  Ten  minutes  to 
nine,  it  says  to  him. 

"  Stopped,"  says  the  man,  half  aloud.  "  That's  an 
other  time  I  forgot  to  wind  it." 

But  the  watch  has  not  stopped.  Insecure  in  his  own 
mind  he  lifts  it  to  his  ear.  It  is  ticking  briskly.  The 
man  is  perplexed.  He  goes  to  the  window  and  peeps 
out  from  it.  A  great  office  building  across  the  way  is 
gaily  alight  —  a  strange  performance  for  before  dawn 
of  a  September  morning.  He  looks  down  into  the  street. 
Two  long  files  of  brightly  lighted  cars  are  passing 
through  the  street,  one  up,  the  other  down.  The  glisten- 

171 


172      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

ing  pavements  are  peopled,  the  stores  are  brightly  lighted 

—  the  man  glances  at  his  watch  once  again.     Eight  min 
utes  of  nine,  it  tells  him  this  time. 

He  smiles  as  he  gazes  down  into  that  busy  street. 

"  This  is  Pittsburgh,"  he  says. 

Later  that  day  that  same  man  stands  in  another  win 
dow —  of  a  tall  skyscraper  this  time  —  and  again  gazes 
down.  Suspended  there  below  him  is  a  seeming  chaos. 
There  are  smoke  and  fog  and  dirt  there,  through  these 

—  showing    ever    and    ever    so    faintly  —  tall,    artificial 
cliffs,  punctured  with  row  upon  row  of  windows,  brightly 
lighted  at  midday.     From  the  narrow  gorges  between 
these  cliffs  come  the  rustle  and  the  rattle  of  much  traf 
fic.     It  comes  to  the  man  in  waves  of  indefinite  sound. 

He  lifts  his  gaze  and  sees  beyond  these  artificial  cliffs, 
mountains  —  real  mountains  —  towering,  with  houses 
upon  their  crests,  and  steep,  inclined  railroads  climbing 
their  precipitous  sides.  In  these  houses,  also,  there  are 
lights  burning  at  midday.  Below  them  are  great  stacks 

—  row  upon  row  upon  row  of  them,  like  coarse-toothed 
combs  turned  upside  down  —  and  the  black  smoke  that 
pours  up  from  them  is  pierced  now  and  then  and  again 
by  bright  tongues  of  flame  —  the  radiance  of  furnaces 
that  glow  throughout  the  night  and  day. 

"  We're  mud  and  dirt  up  to  our  knees  —  and  money 
all  the  rest  of  the  way,"  says  the  owner  of  that  office. 
He  is  a  native  of  the  city.  He  comes  to  the  window  and 
points  to  one  of  the  rivers  —  a  yellow-brown  mirrored 
surface,  scarcely  glistening  under  leaden  clouds  but  bear 
ing  long  tows  by  the  dozen  —  coal  barges,  convoyed  by 
dirty  stern-wheeled  steamboats. 

"  There  is  one  of  the  busiest  harbors  in  the  world," 
says  the  Pittsburgh  man.  "  A  harbor  which  in  tonnage 
is  not  so  far  back  of  your  own  blessed  New  York/' 

The  New  Yorker,  for  this  man  is  a  New  Yorker, 
laughs  at  the  very  idea  of  calling  that  sluggish  narrow 


PITTSBURGH  173 

river  a  harbor.  They  have  a  real  harbor  in  his  town  and 
real  rivers  lead  into  it.  This  does  not  even  seem  a  real 
river.  It  reminds  him  quite  definitely  of  Newtown 
creek  —  that  slimy,  busy  waterway  along  which  trains 
used  to  pass  in  the  days  when  the  Thirty-fourth  street 
ferry  was  the  gateway  to  Long  Island. 

"  We  have  tonnage  in  this  town,"  says  the  proud  resi 
dent  of  Pittsburgh,  "  and  if  you  won't  believe  what  I 
tell  you  about  the  water  traffic,  how  about  our  neat 
little  railroad  business?  If  you  won't  listen  to  our  har 
bor-master  here  when  I  take  you  down  to  him,  look  at 
the  lines  of  freight  cars  for  forty  miles  out  every  trunk- 
line  railroad  that  gets  in  here.  This  is  the  real  gathering 
ground  for  all  the  freight  rolling-stock  of  this  land." 

And  then  he  falls  to  telling  the  native  of  Manhattan 
island  how  all  that  traffic  has  come  to  pass  —  how  a  mere 
quarter  of  a  century  ago  the  Pittsburgh  &  Lake  Erie 
railroad  had  offered  itself  to  the  historic  Erie  for  a  mere 
hundred  thousand  dollars  —  and  had  been  refused  as 
not  worth  while.  Today  the  Pittsburgh  &  Lake  Erie  is 
the  pet  child  of  the  entire  Vanderbilt  family  of  aristo 
cratic  railroads,  earning  more  clear  profit  to  the  mile 
than  any  other  railroad  in  the  world.  The  Pittsburgh 
man  makes  this  all  clear  to  his  caller.  But  the  man  from 
New  York  only  looks  out  again  upon  the  city  in  semi- 
darkness  at  midday,  and  thinks  of  the  towers  of  his  own 
Manhattan  rising  high  into  the  clearest  blue  sky  that  one 
might  imagine,  and  whispers  incoherently : 

"  This  Pittsburgh  gets  me." 

Pittsburgh  gets  some  others,  too.  It  gets  them  from 
the  back  country,  green  country  lads  filled  with  ambi 
tion  rather  than  anything  else,  and  if  they  have  the 
sticking  qualities  it  makes  them  millionaires,  if  that 
so  happens  that  such  is  the  scheme  of  their  ambitions. 
It  has  made  some  other  millionaires,  almost  overnight, 
as  we  shall  see  in  a  few  minutes.  The  picking  for  dol- 


174     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

lars  seems  good  in  the  neighborhood  of  the  confluence  of 
the  Monongahela  and  the  Allegheny. 

Consider  for  a  moment  that  confluence  —  the  geog 
raphy  of  Pittsburgh,  if  you  please.  In  a  general  way  the 
older  part  of  the  town  has  a  situation  not  unlike  that  of 
the  great  metropolis  of  the  continent.  For  New  York's 
East  river,  substitute  the  Monongahela ;  for  the  Hudson, 
the  Allegheny;  and  let  the  Ohio,  beginning  its  long 
course  at  the  Point  —  Pittsburgh's  Battery  —  represent 
the  two  harbors  of  New  York.  Then  you  will  begin  to 
get  the  rough  resemblance.  To  the  south  of  the  Monon 
gahela,  Pittsburgh's  Brooklyn  is  Birmingham,  set  under 
the  half-day  shadows  of  the  towering  cliffs  of  Mount 
Washington.  Allegheny  —  now  a  part  of  the  city  of 
Pittsburgh  and  beginning  to  be  known  semi-officially  as 
the  North  Side  —  corresponds  in  location  with  Jersey 
City. 

And  the  problems  that  have  beset  Pittsburgh  in  her 
growth  have  been  almost  the  very  problems  that  from  the 
first  have  hampered  the  growth  of  metropolitan  New 
York.  If  her  rivers  have  been  no  such  stupendous  af 
fairs  as  the  Hudson  or  the  East  rivers,  the  overpowering 
hills  and  mountains  that  close  in  upon  her  on  every  side 
have  presented  barriers  of  equal  magnitude.  To  con 
quer  them  has  been  the  labor  of  many  tunnels  and  of 
steep  inclined  railroads,  the  like  of  which  are  not  to 
be  seen  in  any  great  city  in  America.  It  has  been  no 
easy  conquest. 

As  a  result  of  all  these  things  the  growth  of  the  city 
has  been  uneven  and  erratic.  Down  on  the  narrow  spit 
of  flat-land  at  the  junction  of  the  two  rivers  that  go  to 
make  the  Ohio  —  a  location  exactly  corresponding  with 
Manhattan  island  below  the  City  Hall  and  of  even  less 
area  —  is  the  business  center  of  metropolitan  Pitts 
burgh —  wholesale  and  retail  stores,  banks,  office  build 
ings,  railroad  passenger  terminals,  hotels,  theaters  and 


PITTSBURGH  175 

the  like.  The  same  causes  that  made  the  skyscraper  a 
necessity  in  New  York  have  worked  a  like  necessity  in 
the  city  at  the  head  of  the  Ohio. 

So  it  has  come  to  pass  that  no  one  lives  in  Pittsburgh 
itself,  unless  under  absolute  compulsion.  The  suburbs 
present  housing  facilities  for  the  better  part  of  its  folk 
—  Sewickley  and  East  Liberty  vie  for  greatest  favor 
with  them  and  there  are  dozens  of  smaller  communi 
ties  that  crowd  close  upon  these  two  social  successes. 
"  We  can  never  get  a  decent  census  figure,"  growls  the 
Pittsburgh  man,  as  he  contemplates  the  size  of  these  out 
lying  boroughs  that  go  to  make  the  city  strong  in  every 
thing,  save  in  that  popular  competitive  feature  of  popu 
lation.  And  that  very  reason  made  the  merging  of  the 
old  city  of  Allegheny  a  popular  issue,  indeed. 

The  fact  that  Pittsburgh  men  live  outside  of  Pitts 
burgh  goes  to  give  her  the  fourth  largest  suburban 
train  service  in  the  country.  Only  New  York,  Boston 
and  Philadelphia  surpass  her  in  this  wise.  Even  San 
Francisco  has  less.  One  hundred  and  fifty  miles  to  the 
northwest  is  Cleveland,  the  sixth  city  in  the  country 
and  outranking  Pittsburgh  in  population.  There  is  not 
a  single  distinctive  suburban  train  run  in  or  out  of 
Cleveland.  From  one  single  terminal  in  Pittsburgh  four 
hundred  passenger  trains  arrive  and  depart  in  the  course 
of  a  single  business  day  and  ninety-five  percent  of  these 
are  for  the  sole  benefit  of  the  commuter. 

So  congested  have  even  these  railroad  facilities  be 
come  that  the  city  cries  bitterly  all  the  while  for  a  tran 
sit  relief  and  experts  have  been  at  work  months  and 
years  planning  a  subway  to  aid  both  the  steam  roads  and 
the  overworked  trolley  lines.  At  best  it  is  no  sinecure 
to  operate  the  trolley  cars  of  Pittsburgh.  Combined 
with  narrow  streets,  uptown  and  downtown,  are  the 
fearful  slopes  of  the  great  hills.  It  takes  big  cars  to 
climb  those  hills,  let  alone  haul  the  trailers  that  are  a 


176     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

feature  of  the  Pittsburgh  rush-hour  traffic.  When  the 
New  Yorker  sees  those  cars  for  the  first  time  he  looks 
again.  They  are  chariots  of  steel,  hardly  smaller  than 
those  that  thread  the  subway  in  his  daily  trip  to  and  from 
Harlem,  and  when  they  come  toward  him  they  make  him 
think  of  locomotives.  The  heavy  car  gives  a  sense  of 
strength  and  of  hill  capability.  But  the  company  stag 
gers  twice  each  day  under  a  traffic  that  is  far  beyond 
its  facilities  —  and  it  staggers  under  its  political  burdens. 

For  it  is  almost  as  much  as  your  very  life  is  worth  to 
"  talk  back "  to  a  street  car  conductor  in  Pittsburgh. 
The  conductor  is  probably  an  arm  of  the  big  political 
machine  that  holds  that  western  Pennsylvania  town  as 
in  the  hollow  of  its  hand.  The  conductors  get  their 
jobs  through  their  alderman,  and  they  hold  them  through 
their  alderman.  So  if  a  New  York  man  forgets  that  he 
is  four  hundred  and  forty  miles  from  Broadway,  and 
gets  to  asserting  his  mind  to  the  man  who  is  in  charge  of 
the  car  let  him  look  out  for  trouble.  Chances  are  nine 
to  one  that  he  will  be  hauled  up  before  a  magistrate  for 
breaking  the  peace,  and  that  another  arm  of  the  politi 
cal  machine  will  come  hard  upon  him. 

A  man,  who  was  a  life-long  resident  of  Pittsburgh, 
once  made  a  protest  to  the  conductor  of  a  car  coming 
across  from  Allegheny.  The  passenger  was  in  the  right 
and  the  conductor  knew  it.  But  he  answered  that  pro 
test  with  a  volley  of  profanity.  If  that  thing  had  hap 
pened  in  a  seaboard  town,  the  conductor's  job  would  not 
have  been  worth  the  formality  of  a  resignation.  In 
Pittsburgh  a  bystander  warned  —  the  passenger  —  and 
he  saved  himself  arrest  by  keeping  his  mouth  shut  and 
getting  off  the  car. 

But  the  Pittsburgh  man  had  not  quite  lost  his  sense  of 
justice,  and  so  he  hurried  to  a  certain  high  officer  of  the 
street  railroad  company.  When  he  came  to  the  com 
pany's  offices  he  was  ushered  in  in  high  state,  for  it  so 


PITTSBURGH  177 

happened  that  the  born  Pittsburgh  man  was  a  director 
of  that  very  corporation.  It  so  happens  that  street 
railroad  directors  do  not  ride  —  like  their  steam  railroad 
brethren  —  on  passes,  and  the  conductor  did  not  know 
that  he  was  playing  flip-flap  with  his  job. 

"  You'll  have  to  fire  that  man,"  said  the  director,  in 
ending  his  complaint.  "If  that  had  happened  at  the 
club  I  would  have  punched  him  in  the  head." 

The  big  man  who  operated  the  street  railroad  looked 
at  the  director,  and  smiled  what  the  lady  novelists  call 
a  sweet,  sad  smile. 

"  Sorry,  Ben,"  said  he,  "  but  I  know  that  man.  He's 

one  of  Alderman  X 's  men,  and  if  we  fired  him 

X would  hang  us  up  on  half  a  dozen  things/' 

Do  you  wonder  that  in  the  face  of  such  a  state  of 
things  transit  relief  comes  rather  slowly  to  Pittsburgh? 

Pittsburgh  men  have  been  trying  to  worm  their  way 
out  of  their  difficulties  for  about  a  century  and  a  half 
now,  for  it  was  1758  that  saw  a  permanent  settlement 
started  there  at  the  junction  of  the  three  great  rivers. 
Before  that  had  been  the  memorable  fight  and  defeat  of 
Braddock  —  not  far  from  where  more  recently  Mr. 
Frick  and  Mr.  Carnegie  have  been  engaged  in  a  rivalry 
as  to  which  could  erect  the  higher  skyscraper  and  most 
effectually  block  out  the  fagade  of  the  very  beautiful 
Court  House  that  the  genius  of  H.  H.  Richardson  de 
signed —  more  than  a  score  of  years  ago.  At  Brad- 
dock's  defeat  George  Washington  fought  and  it  was  no 
less  a  prophetic  mind  than  that  of  the  Father  of  His 
Country  which  foresaw  and  prophesied  that  Pittsburgh, 
with  proper  transportation  facilities,  would  become  one 
of  the  master  cities  of  the  country. 

Today,  when  Pittsburgh  men  grow  nervous  in  one 
of  their  chronic  fits  of  agitation  —  generally  started  by 
some  talkative  city,  such  as  Chicago  and  Duluth,  proclaim 
ing  herself  as  the  future  center  of  the  steel  industry  — 


178     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

she  gains  comfort  from  the  sayings  of  two  Presidents  — • 
General  Washington,  as  just  quoted,  and  the  gentleman 
who  sits  at  the  head  of  the  board  of  the  United  States 
Steel  Corporation,  who  goes  out  there  from  time  to  time 
and  tells  them  to  be  of  good  cheer,  that  the  center  of  the 
steel  business  is  irrevocably  fixed  within  their  town. 
Pittsburgh  worries  much  more  about  the  steel  business 
than  about  the  Richardson  Court  House,  which  has  just 
been  left  high  and  dry  upon  a  local  Gibraltar  because  of 
the  desire  of  the  local  aldermen  to  lower  Fifth  avenue 
some  eight  or  ten  feet.  But  who  shall  say  that  she  should 
not  be  restive  about  a  business  that  reaches  an  output 
in  a  single  twelvemonth  of  something  over  150,000,000 
tons?  That  is  a  jewel  that  is  well  worth  the  keeping. 

Philadelphia  stands  at  the  east  end  of  Pennsylvania; 
Pittsburgh  is  the  west  gate  of  that  Keystone  common 
wealth.  Yet  two  peas  in  a  pod  were  never  half  so  dif 
ferent.  Philadelphia  stands  for  conservatism,  Pitts 
burgh  for  progress.  While  Philadelphia  was  climbing 
to  the  zenith  of  her  power  and  influence  through  the 
first  three-quarters  of  the  last  century  and  reaching  her 
apotheosis  in  her  great  Centennial,  Pittsburgh  was  quiet 
beneath  her  smoke  umbrellas  experimenting  with  that 
strange  new  metal,  which  man  called  steel.  In  the  day 
dreams  that  Philadelphia  enjoyed  in  1876  Pittsburgh 
was  forgotten. 

"  I  suppose  the  Pennsylvania  railroad  must  have  some 
place  to  end  at,"  said  a  lady  from  Rittenhouse  square, 
when  her  attention  was  called  to  the  city  at  the  junction 
of  the  three  rivers.  And  in  the  next  year  that  lady  and 
many  other  ladies  of  the  staunch  old  Quaker  town  were 
holding  up  their  hands  in  holy  horror  at  the  news  from 
Pittsburgh.  Great  riots,  the  bloodiest  that  had  ever 
been  known,  were  marking  the  railroad  strike  there  — 
why,  in  a  single  day  the  rioters  had  burned  the  great 


PITTSBURGH  179 

Union  station,  every  other  railroad  structure,  and  every 
car  in  the  place.  That  was  bad  advertising  for  a  town 
that  had  none  too  many  friends. 

But  Pittsburgh  was  finding  herself  —  she  is  still  in 
that  fascinating  process  of  development.  For  word  was 
eking  out  from  the  rough  mountains  of  western  Penn 
sylvania  that  a  little  group  of  Scotchmen  —  led  by  a 
shrewd  ironmaster  whom  politic  folk  were  already  call 
ing  "  Mr.  Carnegie  " —  had  made  steel  an  economic  struc 
tural  possibility.  In  this  day  when  wood  has  become  a 
luxury,  steel  is  coming  into  its  own  and  Pittsburgh  is 
today  the  most  metropolitan  city  between  New  York  and 
Chicago.  But  she  is  still  finding  herself.  The  Survey, 
financed  by  Mrs.  Russell  Sage,  and  equipped  with  some 
of  the  ablest  and  fairest  minded  social  workers  in  Amer 
ica,  has  called  sharp  attention  to  her  shortcomings.  The 
Survey  did  its  work  thoroughly  and  it  was  not  the  work 
of  a  minute  or  a  day  or  a  week  or  a  month.  When  its 
report  was  ready,  Pittsburgh  smarted.  It  was  the  sort 
of  smarting  that  goes  before  a  cure. 

Much  has  been  done  already.  The  man  who  went  to 
Pittsburgh  as  recently  as  ten  years  ago  carried  away  some 
pretty  definite  memories  of  neglected  railroad  stations 
and  inferior  hotel  facilities.  He  remembered  that  in 
Liberty  and  Penn  avenues  —  two  of  the  chief  shopping 
streets  in  the  city  —  long  trails  of  freight  cars  were  con 
stantly  being  shifted  by  dirty  switch  engines  in  among 
the  trolley  cars,  while  farther  up  these  same  avenues 
the  Fort  Wayne  railroad  tracks  formed  two  of  the  nas 
tiest  grade  crossings  in  America.  When  a  fine  new 
hotel  was  finally  built  away  out  Fifth  avenue,  he  could 
sit  on  its  porch  and  face  Pittsburgh's  famous  farm.  The 
Schenley  farm  stretched  over  the  hill  and  far  away. 
Its  barns  were  sharply  silhouetted  upon  the  horizon, 
rail  zigzag  fences  ran  up  and  down  the  slopes  and  some 
times  one  could  see  cattle  outlined  against  the  sky  edge. 


i8o     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

The  farm  was  a  sore  spot  in  Pittsburgh  development. 
It  occupied  a  tract  somewhat  similar  in  location  to  that 
of  Central  Park  in  Manhattan,  and  the  struggling,  grow 
ing  town  crawled  its  way  around  the  obstacle  slowly  — 
then  grew  many  miles  east  once  again.  Resentment 
gathered  against  the  farm,  and  finally  a  bill  was  slipped 
through  at  Harrisburg  imposing  double  taxes  on  property 
held  by  persons  residing  out  of  the  United  States  —  a 
distinct  slap  at  the  Schenley  estate.  When  the  estate 
protested,  word  was  carried  oversea  to  it  that  if  a  good 
part  of  the  farm  were  dedicated  to  the  city  as  a  park  that 
bill  would  be  withdrawn. 

So  Pittsburgh  gained  its  splendid  new  park,  and  a 
site  for  one  of  the  finest  civic  centers  in  America.  The 
farm  has  begun  to  disappear  —  the  University  of  Pitts 
burgh  is  absorbing  its  last  undeveloped  slope  for  an 
American  Acropolis  that  shall  put  Athens  in  the  pale. 
The  new  Athletic  Club,  the  development  of  the  Hotel 
Schenley,  the  great  Soldiers'  Memorial  Hall  which  Alle 
gheny  county  has  just  finished,  the  even  greater  Carnegie 
Institute,  the  graceful  twin-spired  cathedral,  all  are  go 
ing  toward  the  making  of  this  fine,  new  civic  center, 
and  Pittsburgh  being  Pittsburgh,  and  the  Pirates  social 
heroes,  Forbes  Field  the  finest  baseball  park  in  all  this 
land  —  a  wizardry  of  glass  and  steel  and  concrete  — 
is  a  distinctive  feature  of  this  improvement. 

The  freight  trains  are  gone  from  the  downtown  shop 
ping  streets  and  the  two  wicked  grade  crossings  dis 
appeared  when  the  Pennsylvania  built  its  splendid  new 
Union  Station.  Other  fine  railroad  terminals  and  new 
hotels  have  added  to  the  comfort  of  the  stranger.  They 
are  beginning  in  a  faint  way  to  give  transfers  on  the 
trolley  cars,  and  there  is  more  than  a  promise  that  some 
day  wayfarers  will  not  be  taxed  a  penny  every  time  they 
walk  across  the  bridges  that  bind  the  heart  of  the  city. 
The  bridge  companies  are  private  affairs,  paying  from  fif- 


PITTSBURGH  181 

teen  to  twenty  percent  in  annual  dividends,  and  they  hang 
pretty  tightly  on  to  their  bonanzas.  But  the  Pittsburgh 
Chamber  of  Commerce  is  after  them,  and  that  Chamber 
is  a  fairly  energetic  body.  It  has  already  sought  the 
devil  in  his  lair  and  tried  to  abolish  the  smoke  nuisance, 
with  some  definite  results. 

A  New  York  girl  who  has  been  living  in  Pittsburgh 
for  the  last  four  years  complained  that  she  had  never 
seen  but  two  sunsets  there.  There  is  hope  for  that  girl. 
If  the  Chamber  of  Commerce  keeps  hard  at  its  anti- 
smoke  campaign,  she  may  yet  stand  on  the  Point  and 
down  the  muddy  Ohio  see  something  that  dimly  resem 
bles  the  glorious  dying  of  the  day,  as  one  sees  it  from 
the  heights  of  New  York  city's  Riverside  Drive. 

A  keen-eyed  man  sat  in  an  easy  chair  in  the  luxury 
of  the  Duquesne  Club,  and  faced  the  New  York  man. 

"Are  we  so  bad?"  he  demanded.  "You  New  York 
men  like  to  paint  us  that  way.  You  judge  us  falsely. 
You  think  that  when  you  come  out  here  you  are  going 
to  see  a  sort  of  modern  Sodom,  bowing  to  all  the  gods  of 
money  and  the  gods  of  the  high  tariff.  You  think  you 
are  going  to  fairly  revel  in  a  wide  open  town,  in  the  full 
significance  of  that  phrase,  and  what  do  you  see? 

"  You  see  a  pretty  solid  sort  of  a  Scotch  Presbyterian 
town,  where  you  cannot  even  get  shaved  in  your  hotel 
on  Sunday,  to  say  nothing  of  buying  a  drink.  And  as 
for  shows,  you  can't  buy  your  way  into  a  concert  here 
on  Sunday.  Why,  some  of  the  elders  of  my  kirk  have 
even  looked  askance  at  Mr.  Carnegie  for  the  free  recitals 
that  he  gives  Sabbath  afternoons  in  that  splendid  hall 
of  the  Institute. 

"  There's  your  real  Pittsburgher,  and  if  some  of  the 
boys  have  chafed  a  bit  under  all  the  restraint  that  they 
have  had  here  and  gone  to  the  wicked  city  after  a  little 
fling  and  a  little  advertising,  is  that  any  just  reason  why 
it  all  should  be  charged  against  Pittsburgh?  Pittsburgh 


182      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

has  enough  troubles  of  her  own  without  borrowing  any 
additional  ones. 

"  The  trouble  is  we've  been  making  too  much  money 
to  notice  much  about  the  boys,  or  give  proper  attention 
to  some  pretty  vital  civic  problems  —  that's  why  the  rot 
tenness  cropped  out  in  the  City  Councils.  It's  the  taint 
of  the  almighty  dollar,  Mr.  New  Yorker!  Why,  Mr. 
Carnegie  made  a  couple  of  hundred  of  us  millionaires 
within  a  single  twenty- four  hours.  Can  you  think  of  any 
worse  blow  for  an  average  town? 

"  He  took  some  of  us,  who  had  been  working  for  him 
a  long  time,  and  got  us  into  the  business  —  some  for  an 
eighth  interest,  others  for  a  sixteenth  or  even  a  thirty- 
second.  That  was  great,  and  we  appreciated  it,  but  it 
kept  us  fairly  tight  on  ready  money  for  a  while,  even 
though  Frick  and  Mellen  were  standing  pat  with  an  offer 
of  a  hundred  million  dollars  for  the  bonds  of  the  steel 
company.  I  tell  you  I  was  short  on  ready  money  myself, 
and  wondering  if  I  could  not  cut  down  on  my  house  rent 
$2,000  a  year  and  get  my  wife  to  keep  two  hired  girls 
instead  of  three.  Then  you  know  what  happened.  Car 
negie  himself  took  over  the  bonds  at  a  cold  two  hundred 
million  dollars.  Within  a  week  or  so  I  was  in  New 
York  talking  with  an  architect  about  building  a  new 
house  for  the  missus,  and  getting  passage  tickets  through 
to  Europe/' 

The  ironmaster  called  his  automobile  and  bundled  the 
New  York  man  within  it. 

"  We  are  going  down  into  the  slums,"  he  said.  "  I 
can  show  you  a  single  block  where  thirteen  different 
languages  are  spoken.  That  is  the  new  Pittsburgh  — 
taking  up  one  another's  burdens,  or  something  of  that 
sort,  as  they  call  it.  It  is  queer  until  you  get  used  to  it, 
and  when  you  get  used  to  it,  it  makes  you  feel  like  going 
up  on  the  roof  and  yelling  that  Pittsburgh  is  going  to 


PITTSBURGH  183 

be  the  greatest  city  on  earth,  not  just  the  greatest  in  ton 
nage  or  in  dollars. 

"  That  is  why  we  are  cottoning  to  that  idea  of  a  civic 
center  out  by  Schenley  Park ;  that's  why  we  pat  Andrevf 
Carnegie  on  the  back  when  we  know  that  he  is  giving 
us  the  best  in  pictures  and  in  music  in  America;  that's 
why  Frick  is  holding  back  with  his  horse  pasture  there 
in  front  of  Carnegie  Institute  to  build  something  big 
ger  and  better.  Don't  you  get  the  idea  now  of  the  big 
ger  and  better  Pittsburgh  ?  " 

The  limousine  stopped  and  the  ironmaster  beckoned  a 
large,  whiskered  Russian  to  it.  "  Here's  a  real  an 
archist,"  he  said,  "  but  he  is  one  of  my  proteges.  He 
speaks  down  in  a  dirty  hall  in  Liberty  avenue,  near  the 
Wabash  terminal,  but  he's  for  the  new  Pittsburgh,  and 
he's  for  it  strong  —  so  we  come  together  after  a  fashion/' 

The  Russian,  who  was  a  teacher,  came  close  to  the  big 
automobile  and  pointed  to  a  woman  of  his  own  people  — 
a  woman  wretchedly  poor,  who  dwelt  in  one  of  the  hovels 
which  are  today  Pittsburgh's  greatest  shame. 

"  She's  reading  Byron,"  he  said  quietly,  "  and  she  has 
been  in  America  less  than  six  months.  She  says  there 
is  a  magnificent  comparison  between  Byron  and  Tol 
stoy." 

That  reminded  the  ironmaster  of  an  incident. 

"  After  that  bad  time  in  1907,"  "he  said,  "  I  chanced 
into  one  of  Mr.  Carnegie's  libraries,  and  the  librarian 
complained  to  me  of  the  way  the  books  were  being 
ruined.  Their  backs  were  being  scratched  and  filled 
with  rust  and  even  shavings.  I  had  an  idea  on  that  my 
self.  I  went  back  to  our  own  mill  —  it  was  pretty  dull 
there  and  I  was  dodging  the  forlorn  place  as  much  as  I 
could.  But  we  were  sifting  out  a  gang  from  the  men 
who  were  beating  at  our  doors  every  morning  for  work, 
and  even  then  we  were  carrying  twice  as  many  men  as 


184     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

we  really  needed.  I  went  around  back  of  the  furnaces 
and  there  were  the  library  books  —  the  men  were  read 
ing  them  in  the  long  shifts." 

"  They  weren't  reading  fiction  ? "  asked  the  New 
Yorker. 

"  Not  a  bit  of  it,"  said  the  ironmaster.  Then 
he  added: 

"  One  of  them  spoke  to  me.  He  was  only  getting  three 
days  a  week.  '  Mr.  Carnegie  can  give  the  books,'  was 
his  quiet  observation,  '  and  the  money  to  buy  them.  But 
we  need  more  than  money.  Can't  he  ever  give  us  the 
leisure  to  read  them  without  its  costing  us  the  money 
for  our  food  ?  ' 

"  That,  New  Yorker,  from  the  mouth  of  one  of  those 
of  the  new  Pittsburgh  is  the  real  answer  to  your 
question." 


II 

THE  SIXTH  CITY 

THEY  call  her  the  Sixth  City,  but  that  is  only  in  a 
comparative  sense,  and  exclusively  in  regard  to 
her  statistical  position  in  the  population  ranks  of  the 
large  cities  of  our  land.  For  no  real  citizen  of  Cleve 
land  will  ever  admit  that  his  community  is  less  than  first, 
in  all  of  the  things  that  make  for  the  advance  of  a  strong 
and  healthy  American  town.  His  might  better  be  called 
"  the  City  of  Boundless  Enthusiasm."  Your  Cleveland 
man,  however,  is  content  to  know  it  as  the  Sixth  City. 

"  Not  that  it  really  matters  whether  we  are  the  fifth 
or  the  seventh  —  or  the  sixth,"  he  tells  you.  "  Only  it 
all  goes  to  show  how  we've  bobbed  up  in  the  last  twenty 
years.  You  know  what  we  used  to  be  —  an  inconsider 
able  lake  port  up  on  the  north  brink  of  Ohio  with  Cin 
cinnati  down  there  in  the  south  pruning  herself  as  a 
real  metropolis  and  calling  herself  the  Queen  City.  We 
might  call  ourselves  the  Queen  City  today  and  stretch 
no  points,  but  that's  a  sort  of  fancy  title  that's  gone  out 
of  fashion  now.  The  Sixth  City  sounds  more  like  the 
Twentieth  Century." 

And  Cleveland  having  thus  baptized  herself,  as  it  were, 
proceeded  to  spread  her  new  name  to  the  world. 
"  Cleveland  —  Sixth  City  "  appeared  on  the  stationery 
of  her  business  houses;  her  tailors  stitched  it  in  upon 
the  labels  of  the  ready-made  suits  they  sent  to  all  corners 
of  the  land;  her  bakers  stamped  it  on  the  products  of 
their  ovens ;  big  shippers  stenciled  it  over  packing-cases ; 
manufacturers  even  placed  it  upon  the  brass-plates  of  the 

185 


186     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

lathes  and  other  complicated  machines  they  sent  forth 
from  their  shops.  Today  when  you  say  "  Sixth  City  '' 
to  an  American  he  replies  "  Cleveland,"  which  is  pre 
cisely  what  Cleveland  intended  he  should  reply. 

Now  why  has  Cleveland  taken  her  new  position  of 
sixth  among  the  cities  of  the  land  ?  Ask  your  Cleveland 
man  that,  and  he  will  take  you  by  the  elbow  and  march 
you  straight  toward  the  docks,  that  not  only  line  her 
lake  front  but  extend  for  miles  up  within  the  curious 
twistings  of  the  Cuyahoga  river. 

"  Lake  traffic,"  he  will  tell  you,  and  begin  to  quote 
statistics. 

We  will  spare  you  most  of  the  statistics.  It  is  meet 
that  you  should  know,  however,  that  upon  the  five  Great 
Lakes  there  throbs  a  commerce  that  might  well  be  the 
envy  of  any  far-reaching,  salty  sea.  To  put  the  thing 
concretely,  the  freight  portion  of  this  traffic  alone  reached 
tremendous  totals  in  1912.  In  the  navigation  months 
of  that  year,  exactly  47,435,477  tons  of  iron  ore  and  an 
even  greater  tonnage  of  coal  moved  upon  the  Lakes, 
while  the  enormous  total  of  158,000,000  bushels  of  grain 
were  received  at  the  port  of  Buffalo.  And  although 
there  are  tens  of  thousands  of  sailormen  upon  the  salt 
seas  who  have  never  heard  of  Cleveland,  the  business  of 
the  port  of  Cleveland  is  comparable  with  that  of  the  port 
of  Liverpool,  one  of  the  very  greatest  and  the  very  bus 
iest  harbors  in  all  the  world.  For  four  out  of  every  five 
of  the  great  steel  steamships  carrying  the  iron  ore  and 
coal  cargoes  of  the  lakes  are  operated  from  Cleveland. 
Until  the  formation  of  the  United  States  Steel  cor 
poration  a  few  years  ago  she  could  also  say  that  she 
owned  four  out  of  five  of  these  vessels.  And  today  her 
indirect  interest  in  them,  through  the  steel  corporation, 
is  not  small. 

As  the  Cleveland  man  continues  to  din  these  statistics 
into  your  ear,  you  let  your  gaze  wander.  Over  across 


CLEVELAND  187 

a  narrow  slip  a  gaunt  steel  framework  rises.  It  holds 
a  cradle,  large  enough  and  strong  enough  to  accommodate 
a  single  steel  railroad  "  gondola,"  which  in  turn  carries 
fifty  tons  of  bituminous  coal.  The  sides  of  the  table  are 
clamped  over  the  sides  of  one  of  these  "  gondola  "  cars, 
which  a  seemingly  tireless  switch-engine  has  just  shunted 
into  it.  Slowly  the  cradle  is  raised  to  the  top  of  the 
framework.  A  bell  strikes  and  it  raises  itself  upon  edge, 
three-quarters  of  the  way  over.  The  coal  rushes  out  of 
the  car  in  an  uprising  cloud  of  black  dust  and  drops 
through  a  funnel  into  the  expansive  hold  of  the  vessel 
that  is  moored  at  the  dock.  The  car  is  righted;  some 
remaining  coal  rattles  to  its  bottom.  Once  again  it  is 
overturned  and  the  remaining  coal  goes  through  the  fun 
nel.  When  it  is  righted  the  second  time  it  is  entirely 
empty.  The  cradle  returns  to  its  low  level,  the  car  is  un 
fastened  and  given  a  push.  It  makes  a  gravity  movement 
and  returns  to  a  string  of  its  fellows  that  have  been 
through  a  similar  process. 

You  take  out  your  watch.  The  process  consumes 
just  two  minutes  for  each  car.  That  means  thirty  cars 
an  hour.  In  an  hour  fifteen  hundred  tons  of  coal,  the 
capacity  of  a  long  and  heavily  laden  train,  have  been 
placed  in  the  hold  of  the  waiting  vessel.  You  are  fa 
miliar,  perhaps,  with  the  craft  that  tie  up  at  the  wharves 
of  seaboard  towns,  and  you  roughly  estimate  the  ca 
pacity  of  this  coal-carrier  at  some  forty-five  hundred 
tons.  It  is  going  to  take  but  three  hours  to  fill  her  great 
hold,  and  you  find  yourself  astonished  at  the  result  of 
such  computations.  You  confide  that  astonishment  to 
your  Cleveland  man.  He  smiles  at  you,  benignly. 

"  That  is  really  not  very  rapid  work,"  he  says,  "  they 
put  eleven  thousand  tons  of  ore  into  the  Corey  in  thirty- 
nine  minutes  up  at  Superior  last  year." 

And  that  is  the  record  loading  of  a  vessel  for  all  the 
world.  When  the  British  ship-owners  heard  of  that 


i88     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

feat  at  a  port  two  thousand  miles  inland,  they  ceased  to 
deride  American  docking  facilities. 

The  Cleveland  man  begins  telling  you  something  of 
this  lake  traffic  in  iron  ore  and  soft  coal  —  almost  three- 
quarters  of  the  total  tonnage  of  the  lakes.  The  workable 
iron  deposits  of  America  are  today  in  greatest  profusion 
within  a  comparatively  few  miles  of  the  head  of  Lake 
Superior  —  nothing  has  yet  robbed  western  Pennsyl 
vania  and  West  Virginia  of  their 'supremacy  as  produ 
cers  of  bituminous  coal.  There  is  an  ideal  traffic  con 
dition,  the  condition  that  lines  the  railroad  cars  for  forty 
miles  roundabout  Pittsburgh.  The  great  cost  in  han 
dling  freight  upon  the  average  railroad  comes  from  the 
fact  that  it  is  generally  what  is  known  as  "  one-way  " 
business  —  that  is,  the  volume  of  traffic  moves  in  a 
single  direction,  necessitating  an  expensive  and  waste 
ful  return  haul  of  empty  cars.  There  is  no  such  traf 
fic  waste  upon  the  Great  Lakes.  The  ships  that  go 
up  and  down  the  long  water  lanes  of  Erie  and  Huron  and 
Superior  do  not  worry  about  ballast  for  the  return. 
They  carry  coal  from  Buffalo,  Erie,  Ashtabula,  Con- 
neaut  and  Cleveland  to  Duluth  and  Superior  and  they 
come  back  with  their  capacious  holds  filled  with  red 
iron  ore.  There  is  your  true  economy  in  transportation, 
and  the  reflection  of  it  comes  in  the  fact  that  these  ships 
haul  cargo  at  the  rate  of  .78  of  a  mill  for  a  ton-mile, 
which  is  the  lowest  freight-rate  in  the  world. 

Cleveland  built  these  ships,  in  fact  she  still  is  building 
the  greater  part  of  them.  And  she  thinks  nothing  of 
building  the  largest  of  these  steel  vessels  in  ninety  days. 
Take  a  second  look  at  that  vessel  —  the  coal  cars  are 
still  pouring  their  grimy  treasure  into  her  hold.  She 
is  builded,  like  all  of  these  new  freighters,  with  a  sever 
ity  that  shows  the  bluff  utilitarianism  of  the  shipbuilders 
of  the  Great  Lakes.  None  of  the  finicky  traditions  of 
the  Clyde  rule  the  minds  of  the  men  who  today  are 


CLEVELAND  189 

building  the  merchant  marine  of  the  Lakes.  One  deck 
house,  with  the  navigating  headquarters,  is  forward;  the 
other,  with  funnel  and  the  other  externals  of  the  ship's 
propelling  mechanism,  is  at  the  extreme  stern.  Amid 
ships  your  Great  Lakes  carrier  is  cargo  —  and  nothing 
else.  No  tangle  of  line  or  burden  of  trivials;  just  a  red- 
walled  hull  of  thick  steel  plates  and  a  steel-plate  deck 
—  broken  into  thirty-six  hatches  and  of  precisely  the 
same  shade  of  red  —  for  these  ships'  are  quickly  painted 
by  hose-spray.  Remember  that  it  is  ninety  days  —  from 
keel-plates  to  launching.  In  another  thirty  days  the 
ship's  simple  fittings  are  finished  and  her  engines  in 
her  heart  are  ready  to  pound  from  down-Lakes  to  up- 
Lakes  and  back  innumerable  times. 

If  we  have  given  some  attention  in  this  Cleveland 
chapter  to  the  traffic  of  the  Great  Lakes,  it  is,  as  we 
have  already  intimated,  because  the  traffic  of  the  Great 
Lakes  has  made  her  the  Sixth  City.  It  has  also  made 
the  most  important  of  her  industries,  the  very  greatest 
of  her  fortunes.  Your  Cleveland  man  will  tell  you  of 
one  of  these  —  before  you  leave  the  pier-edge.  It  was 
the  fortune  that  an  old  Lake  captain  left  at  his  death  — 
a  little  time  ago  —  the  fortune  a  mere  matter  of  some 
twenty-eight  millions  of  dollars.  The  old  captain  knew 
the  Lakes  and  he  had  studied  their  traffic  —  all  his  life. 
But  his  will  directed  that  his  money  should  not  be  ex 
pended  in  the  building  of  ships.  It  provided  that  at 
least  a  quarter  of  a  million  of  the  income  should  annually 
go  to  the  purchase  of  Cleveland  real  estate.  And  Cleve 
land  was  quick  to  explain  that  it  was  not  that  the  old 
man  loved  shipping  less,  but  that  he  loved  Cleveland  real 
estate  more.  He  had  the  gift  of  foresight. 

If  you  would  see  that  foresight  in  his  own  eyes  drive 
out  Euclid  avenue  —  that  broad  thoroughfare  that  leads 
from  the  old-fashioned  Public  Square  in  the  heart  of  the 


PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

city  straight  toward  the  southeast.  Euclid  avenue  gained 
its  fame  in  other  days.  Travelers  used  to  come  back 
from  Cleveland  and  tell  of  the  glories  of  that  highway. 
Alas,  today  those  glories  are  largely  those  of  memory. 
The  old  houses  still  sit  in  their  great  lawns,  but  the  grime 
of  the  city's  industry  has  made  them  seem  doubly  old 
and  decadent,  while  Commerce  has  pushed  her  smart  new 
shops  out  among  them  to  the  very  sidewalk  line.  Many 
of  these  shops  are  given  over  to  the  automobile  business 
—  a  business  which  does  not  hesitate  in  any  of  our  towns 
to  transform  resident  streets  into  commercial.  But  in 
Cleveland  one  may  partly  forgive  the  audacity  of  this 
particular  trade  in  recognition  of  its  perspicacity.  For 
Euclid  avenue,  rapidly  growing  now  from  an  entirely 
residential  street  into  an  entirely  business  highway,  is 
the  great  automobile  thoroughfare  of  the  East  Side  of  the 
city.  And  when  you  consider  that  one  out  of  every  ten 
Cleveland  families  has  a  motor  car,  you  can  begin  to 
estimate  the  traffic  through  Euclid  avenue. 

There  is  a  West  Side  of  Cleveland  —  you  might  al 
most  say,  of  course  —  but  one  does  not  come  to  know  it 
until  he  comes  to  know  Cleveland  well.  The  city  is 
builded  upon  a  high  plateau  that  rises  in  a  steep  bluff 
from  the  very  edge  of  the  lake.  Through  this  plateau, 
at  the  very  bottom  of  a  ravine,  wide  and  deep,  the 
navigable  Cuyahoga  twists  its  tortuous  way  into  Lake 
Erie.  It  seems  as  if  that  ravine  must  almost  have  been 
cut  to  test  the  resources  of  the  bridge-builders  of  Amer 
ica.  For  it  has  been  their  problem  to  keep  the  Sixth 
City  from  becoming  entirely  severed  by  her  great  water 
artery.  They  have  solved  it  by  the  construction  of  one 
huge  steel  viaduct  after  another  but  the  West  Side  re 
mains  the  West  Side  —  and  always  somewhat  jealous 
of  the  East.  She  knows  that  the  great  public  buildings 
of  Cleveland  —  that  comprehensive  civic  center  plan  to 
which  we  shall  come  in  a  moment  —  are  fixed  for  all 


CLEVELAND  191 

time  upon  the  East.  And  so  when  Cleveland  decides  to 
build  a  great  new  city  hall,  the  West  Side  demands  and 
receives  the  finest  market  house  in  all  the  land. 

So  it  is  that  it  is  the  East  Side  that  your  Cleveland 
man  shows  you  alone  when  your  time  is  limited,  and  so 
it  is  that  Euclid  avenue  is  the  one  great  thoroughfare 
of  the  whole  East  Side. 

"If  you  want  to  know  how  we've  bobbed  up,  look  at 
here,"  the  Cleveland  man  tells  you. 

You  look.  A  contractor  is  busy  changing  a  railroad 
crossing  from  level  to  overhead ;  a  much-needed  improve 
ment  —  despite  the  fact  that  it  should  have  been  under- 
surf ace  rather  than  overhead  —  when  you  come  to  con 
sider  the  traffic  that  moves  through  Euclid  avenue  in 
all  the  daylight  hours  and  far  into  the  night. 

"  When  the  old  Cleveland  and  Pittsburgh  —  it's  part 
of  the  Pennsylvania,  now  —  was  built,  thirty-five  or 
forty  years  ago,  they  thought  they  would  put  the  line 
around  the  town.  But  the  town  was  up  to  their  line 
before  they  knew  it  —  and  they  decided  ten  or  a  dozen 
years  ago  that  they  would  put  a  suburban  station  here." 
He  points  to  a  handsome  red  brick  structure  of  modern 
architecture.  "  The  Pennsylvania  folks  are  long-headed 
—  almost  always.  But  if  they  had  known  that  Cleve 
land  was  to  become  the  Sixth  City  within  ten  years  they 
never  would  have  put  two  hundred  thousand  dollars  in 
a  grade  crossing  station  at  Euclid  avenue.  The  way 
we've  grown  has  sort  of  startled  all  of  us." 

Today  Euclid  avenue  is  a  compactly  built  thorough 
fare  for  miles  east  of  that  Pennsylvania  railroad  cross 
ing.  It  is  at  least  two  miles  and  a  half  from  that  crossing 
to  Cleveland's  two  great  educational  lions  —  the  Case 
School  of  Applied  Science  and  the  Western  Reserve 
University  —  and  they  in  turn  only  mark  the  beginning 
of  the  city's  newest  and  most  fashionable  residence 
district. 


192     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Indeed  Cleveland  has  "  bobbed  up."  And  her  growth 
within  the  last  quarter  of  a  century  has  been  more  than 
physical,  more  than  that  recorded  by  emotionless  census- 
takers.  For  beneath  those  grimy  old  houses  on  Euclid 
avenue  and  the  down  town  residence  streets,  beneath  the 
roofs  of  those  gray  and  grimy  story-and-a-half  wooden 
houses  which  line  far  less  pretentious  streets  for  long 
miles,  lies  as  restless  and  as  hopeful  a  civic  spirit  as  any 
town  in  America  can  boast.  It  makes  itself  manifest 
in  many  ways — as  we  shall  see.  The  man  who  first 
brought  it  into  a  working  force  was  a  resourceful  little 
man  who  died  a  little  while  ago.  But  before  Tom  L. 
Johnson  died  he  was  Mayor  of  the  city;  something 
more ;  he  was  the  best  liked  and  the  best  hated  man  that 
Cleveland  had  ever  known ;  and  he  was  better  liked  than 
he  was  hated. 

In  person  a  plump  little  man  with  a  ceaseless  smile 
that  might  have  been  stolen  from  a  Raphael  cherub,  a 
democratic  little  man,  who  knew  his  fellows  and  who 
could  read  them,  almost  unfailingly.  And  the  smile 
could  change  from  softness  into  severity  —  when  Tom 
L.  Johnson  wanted  a  thing  he  wanted  it  mighty  hard. 
And  he  generally  succeeded  in  getting  it.  He  could  not 
only  read  men;  he  could  read  affairs.  He  saw  Cleve 
land  coming  to  be  the  Sixth  City.  And  he  determined 
that  she  should  realize  the  dignity  of  metropolitanism  in 
other  fashion  than  in  merely  census  totals  or  bank 
clearances. 

Johnson  began  by  going  after  the  street  railroad  sys 
tem  of  the  town.  He  had  had  some  experience  in  build 
ing  and  operating  street  railroads  in  other  parts  of  the 
country,  and  he  set  out  along  paths  that  were  not  entirely 
unfamiliar  to  him.  It  so  happened  that  at  the  time  he 
began  his  crusade  Cleveland  was  quite  satisfied  with  her 
street  railroad  service.  Her  residents  went  out  to  other 
cities  of  the  land  and  bragged  about  how  their  big  yellow 


CLEVELAND  193 

cars  ran  out  to  all  the  far  corners  of  their  rapidly  grow 
ing  city.  But  Johnson  was  not  criticising  the  service. 
He  was  merely  saying  in  his  gentle  insistent  way  that 
five  cents  was  too  much  for  a  man  to  pay  to  ride  upon  a 
street  car.  He  thought  three  cents  was  quite  enough. 
The  street  railroad  company  quite  naturally  thought 
differently.  In  every  other  town  in  the  land  five  cents 
was  the  standard  fare,  and  any  Cleveland  man  could  tell 
you  how  much  better  the  car-service  was  at  home.  That 
company  produced  vast  tables  of  statistics  to  prove  its 
contentions.  Tom  L.  Johnson  merely  laughed  at  the 
statistics  and  reiterated  that  three  cents  was  a  sufficient 
street-car  fare  for  Cleveland. 

The  details  of  that  cause  celebre  are  not  to  be  recited 
here.  It  is  enough  here  to  say  that  Tom  L.  Johnson 
lived  long  enough  to  see  three-cent  fares  upon  the  Cleve 
land  cars,  and  that  the  conclusion  was  not  reached  until 
a  long  and  bitter  battle  had  been  fought.  The  conclu 
sion  itself  as  it  stands  today  is  interesting.  The  owners 
of  the  street  railroad  stock,  the  successors  of  the  men 
who  invested  their  money  on  a  courageous  gamble  that 
Cleveland  was  to  grow  into  a  real  city  are  assured  of  a 
legitimate  six  percent  upon  their  stock.  They  cannot 
expect  more.  If  the  railroad  earns  more  than  that 
fixed  six  percent  its  fares  must  be  reduced.  If,  on 
the  other  hand,  it  fails  to  earn  six  percent  the  fares 
must  be  raised  sufficiently  to  permit  that  return.  The 
fare-steps  are  simple,  a  cent  at  a  time,  with  a  cent  being 
charged  for  a  transfer,  or  a  transfer  being  furnished 
free  as  best  may  meet  the  income  need  of  the  railroad. 

At  present  the  fare  is  three  cents,  transfers  being 
furnished  free.  A  little  while  ago  the  fare  was  three 
cents,  a  cent  being  charged  for  the  transfer.  That 
brought  an  unnecessarily  high  revenue  to  the  railroad, 
and  so  today  while  the  conductor  who  issues  you  a 
transfer  gravely  charges  you  a  cent  for  it,  the  con- 


194     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

ductor  who  accepts  it,  with  equal  gravity,  presents  you 
a  cent  in  return  for  it.  This  prevents  the  transfers  being 
used  as  stationery  or  otherwise  frivoled  away.  For, 
while  the  street  car  system  of  Cleveland  is  among  the 
best  operated  in  America,  it  is  also  one  of  the  most 
whimsical.  Its  cars  are  proof  of  that.  Some  of  them 
are  operated  on  the  so-called  "  pay-as-you-enter  "  prin 
ciple,  although  Cleveland,  which  has  almost  a  passion 
for  abbreviation,  calls  them  the  "  paye "  cars.  These 
cars  are  still  a  distinct  novelty  in  most  of  our  cities. 
In  Cleveland  they  are  almost  as  old  as  Noah's  Ark  com 
pared  with  a  car  in  which  you  pay  as  you  leave  —  a 
most  sensible  fashion  —  or  a  still  newer  car  in  which  you 
can  pay  as  you  enter  or  pay  as  you  leave  —  a  choice 
which  you  elect  by  going  to  one  end  or  the  other  of  the 
vehicle. 

But  the  fact  remains  that  Cleveland  has  three-cent 
fares  upon  her  excellent  street  railroad  system,  to  say 
nothing  of  having  control  over  her  most  important  util 
ity,  the  street  railroad,  which  pays  six  percent  dividends 
to  its  owners.  The  three-cent  fare  seems  standard  in 
Cleveland.  In  fact,  she  is  becoming  a  three-cent  city. 
Small  shops  make  attractive  offers  at  that  low  figure, 
and  "  three-cent  movies "  are  springing  up  along  her 
streets.  She  has  already  gone  down  to  Washington  and 
demanded  that  the  Federal  government  issue  a  three- 
cent  piece  —  to  meet  her  peculiar  needs.  So  does  the 
spirit  of  Tom  L.  Johnson  still  go  marching  on. 

It  must  have  been  the  spirit  of  Tom  L.  Johnson  that 
gave  Cleveland  a  brand-new  charter  in  this  year  of 
Grace,  1913.  Into  this  new  charter  have  been  written 
many  things  that  would  have  been  deemed  impossible 
in  the  charter  of  a  large  American  city  even  a  decade 
ago.  Initiative  and  referendum,  of  course  —  Johnson 
and  his  little  band  of  faithful  followers  were  not  satis 
fied  until  they  had  gone  to  Columbus  a  few  winters  ago 


CLEVELAND  195 

and  written  that  into  the  new  constitution  of  the  state 
of  Ohio  —  a  department  of  public  welfare  to  regulate 
everything  from  the  safety  and  morals  of  "  three-cent 
movies  "  to  the  larger  questions  of  public  health  and  even 
of  public  employment,  the  very  sensible  short  ballot, 
and  even  the  newest  comer  in  our  family  of  civic  re 
forms  —  the  preferential  ballot,  although  at  the  time 
that  this  is  being  written  it  is  being  sharply  contested 
in  the  high  courts  at  Columbus.  Cleveland  rejected  the 
commission  form  of  government.  The  fact  that  a  good 
many  other  progressive  American  towns  have  accepted 
it,  did  not,  in  her  mind,  weigh  for  or  against  it.  She 
has  never  been  a  city  of  strong  conventions  —  witness 
her  refusal  to  regard  the  five-cent  fare  as  standard, 
simply  because  other  towns  had  it.  Neither  has  tradi 
tion  been  permitted  to  warp  her  course.  A  few  years 
ago  her  citizens  decided  that  her  system  of  street  names 
was  not  good  enough  or  expansive  enough  for  a  town 
that  was  entering  the  metropolitan  class.  So  she 
changed  most  of  her  street  names  —  almost  in  the  pass 
ing  of  a  night.  In  most  American  towns  that  would 
have  been  out  of  the  question.  Folk  cling  to  street 
names  almost  as  they  cling  to  family  traditions.  But 
Cleveland  folk  seemed  to  realize  instantly  that  the  new 
system  of  numbered  cross-streets  —  with  the  broad  diag 
onal  highways  named  "  roads  " —  after  the  fashion  of 
some  English  cities  —  was  so  far  the  best  that  she  im 
mediately  gave  herself  to  the  new  scheme  with  heart  and 
soul,  as  seems  to  be  her  way. 

To  tell  of  a  splendid  new  charter  adopted,  of  the  con 
trol  gained  over  her  chief  utility  and  necessity,  of  the 
progressive  social  reforms  that  she  houses,  is  not  alone 
to  tell  of  the  splendid  heart  and  soul  that  beats  within 
the  walls  and  roofs  of  her  houses.  It  is,  quite  as  much, 
to  tell  of  a  remarkable  cooperation,  remarkable  when 
you  consider  that  Cleveland  has  become  a  city  of  more 


196     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

than  six  hundred  thousand  humans.     That  cooperation 
may  best  be  illustrated  by  a  single  incident : 

A  retail  dealer  in  hardware  recently  opened  a  fine 
new  store  out  in  Euclid  avenue.  He  opened  it  as  some 
small  cities  might  open  their  new  library  or  their  new 
city  hall  —  with  music  and  a  reception.  His  friends  sent 
great  bouquets  of  flowers,  the  concerns  from  which  he 
bought  his  supplies  sent  more  flowers;  but  the  biggest 
bunch  of  flowers  came  from  the  men  who  were  his  com 
petitors  in  the  same  line  of  business.  That  was  Cleve 
land  —  Cleveland  spirit,  Cleveland  generosity.  Perhaps 
that  is  the  secret  of  Cleveland  success. 

One  thing  more  —  the  plan  for  the  Cleveland  civic 
center.  For  the  Sixth  City  having  set  her  mental  house 
in  order  is  to  build  for  it  a  physical  house  of  great  utility 
and  of  compelling  beauty.  You  may  have  heard  of  the 
Cleveland  civic  plan.  It  is  in  the  possibility  that  you 
have  not,  that  we  bring  it  in  for  a  final  word.  When 
Cleveland  set  out  to  obtain  a  new  Federal  Post  Office  and 
Court  House  for  herself,  a  few  years  ago,  it  came  to  her 
of  a  sudden  that  she  was  singularly  lacking  in  fine  public 
buildings.  It  was  suggested  that  she  should  seek  for 
herself  not  only  a  Federal  building  but  a  new  Court 
House  and  City  Hall  as  well.  In  the  same  breath  it  was 
proposed  that  these  be  brought  into  a  beautiful  and  a 
practical  group.  It  was  an  attractive  suggestion.  In 
the  fertile  soil  of  Cleveland  attractive  suggestions  take 
quick  root.  And  so  in  Cleveland  was  born  the  civic 
center  idea  that  has  spread  almost  like  the  proverbial 
wildfire  all  the  way  across  the  land. 

To  create  her  civic  group  she  moved  in  a  broad  and 
decisive  fashion.  She  engaged  three  of  the  greatest  of 
American  architects  —  A.  W.  Brunner,  John  M.  Car- 
rere,  D.  H.  Burnham  —  two  of  them  poets  and  idealists, 
the  third  almost  the  creator  of  America's  most  utilitarian 


CLEVELAND  197 

type  of  building,  the  modern  skyscraper.  To  these  men 
she  gave  a  broad  and  unlocked  path.  And  they  created 
for  her,  along  a  broad  Mall  stretching  from  Superior 
street  to  the  very  edge  of  that  mighty  cliff  that  over 
looks  the  lake,  a  plan  for  the  housing  of  her  greatest 
functions. 

It  is  not  too  much  that  Cleveland  should  dream  of  this 
Mall  as  an  American  Place  de  la  Concorde.  It  was  not 
too  much  when  the  architects  breathed  twenty  millions 
of  dollars  as  the  possible  cost  of  this  civic  dream.  Cleve 
land  merely  breathed  "  Go  ahead,"  and  the  architects 
have  gone  ahead.  The  Post  Office  and  the  new  County 
Building  are  already  completed  and  in  use,  the  City  Hall 
should  be  completed  before  1915  comes  to  take  his  place 
in  the  history  of  the  world.  Other  buildings  are  to 
follow,  not  the  least  of  them  a  new  Union  station  — 
although  there  will  be  travelers  who  will  sincerely  regret 
the  passing  of  Cleveland's  stout  old  stone  station,  whose 
high-vaulted  train-shed  seemed  to  them  in  boyhood  days 
to  be  the  most  lofty  and  wonderful  of  apartments.  The 
bulk  of  this  new  open  square  is  yet  to  be  cleared  of  the 
many  buildings  that  today  occupy  it.  But  that  is  merely 
a  detail  in  the  development  of  Cleveland's  greatest  archi 
tectural  ambition. 

The  civic  group  can  never  be  more  than  the  outward 
expression  of  the  ambitious  spirit  of  a  new  giant  among 
the  metropolitan  cities  of  America.  As  such  it  can  be 
eminently  successful.  It  can  speak  for  the  city  whose 
civic  heart  it  becomes,  proclaiming  her  not  merely  great 
in  dollars  or  in  the  swarming  throngs  of  her  population, 
but  rather  great  in  strength  of  character,  in  charity,  in 
generosity  —  in  all  those  admirable  things  that  go  to 
make  a  town  preeminently  good  and  great.  And  in  these 
things  your  Cleveland  man  will  not  proclaim  his  as  the 
Sixth  City,  but  rather  as  in  the  front  rank  of  all  the 
larger  communities  of  the  L^nited  States. 


12 

CHICAGO  — AND  THE  CHICAGOANS 

EARLY  in  the  morning  the  city  by  the  lake  is  astir. 
Before  the  first  long  scouting  rays  of  earliest  sun 
light  are  thrusting  themselves  over  the  barren  reaches 
of  Michigan  —  state  and  lake  —  Chicago  is  in  action. 
The  nervous  little  suburban  trains  are  reaching  into 
her  heart  from  South,  from  North  and  from  West.  The 
long  trains  of  elevated  cars  are  slipping  along  their 
alley-routes,  skirting  behind  long  rows  of  the  dirty  color 
less  houses  of  the  most  monotonous  city  on  earth,  thread 
ing  themselves  around  the  loop  —  receiving  passengers, 
discharging  passengers  before  dawn  has  fully  come  upon 
the  town.  The  windows  of  the  tedious,  almost  endless 
rows  of  houses  flash  into  light  and  life,  the  trolley  cars 
in  the  broad  streets  come  at  shorter  intervals,  in  whole 
companies,  brigades,  regiments  —  a  mighty  army  of 
trucks  and  wagons  begin  to  send  up  a  great  wave  of 
noise  and  of  clatter  from  the  shrieking  highways  and 
byways  of  the  city. 

The  traveler  coming  to  the  city  from  the  east  and  by 
night  finds  it  indeed  a  mighty  affair.  For  an  hour  and 
a  half  before  his  train  arrives  at  the  terminal  station, 
he  is  making  his  way  through  Chicago  environs  —  com 
ing  from  dull  flat  monotonies  of  sand  and  brush  and  pine 
into  Gary  —  with  its  newness  and  its  bigness  proclaimed 
upon  its  very  face  so  that  even  he  who  flits  through  at 
fifty  miles  an  hour  may  read  both  —  jolting  over  main 
line  railroads  that  cross  and  recross  at  every  conceiv- 

198 


CHICAGO  199 

able  angle,  snapping  up  through  Hammond  and  Ken 
sington  and  Grand  Crossing  —  to  the  right  and  to  the 
left  long  vistas  with  the  ungainly,  picturesque  outlines 
of  steel  mills  with  upturned  rows  of  smoking  stacks, 
of  gas-holders  and  of  packing-houses,  the  vistas  sud 
denly  closed  off  by  long  trails  of  travel-worn  freight- 
cars,  through  which  the  traveler's  train  finds  its  way  with 
a  mighty  clattering  and  reverberating  of  noisy  echoes. 
This  is  Chicago  —  Chicago  spreading  itself  over  miles 
of  absolutely  flat  shore-land  at  almost  the  extreme  south 
ern  tip  of  Lake  Michigan  —  Chicago  proudly  proclaim 
ing  herself  as  the  business  and  the  transportation 
metropolis  of  the  land,  disdaining  such  mere  seaport 
places  as  New  York  or  Boston  or  Baltimore  or  San 
Francisco  —  Chicago  with  the  most  wretched  approaches 
on  her  main  lines  of  travel  of  any  great  city  of  the 
world. 

If  you  come  to  her  on  at  least  one  of  the  great  rail 
roads  that  link  her  with  the  Atlantic  seaboard,  you  will 
get  a  glimpse  of  her  one  redeeming  natural  feature,  for 
five  or  six  miles  before  your  train  comes  to  a  final  grind 
ing  stop  at  the  main  terminal  —  the  blue  waters  of  the 
lake.  This  railroad  spun  its  way  many  years  ago  on 
the  very  edge  of  the  lake  —  much  to  the  present-day 
grief  of  the  town.  It  gives  no  grief  to  the  incoming 
traveler  —  to  turn  from  the  sordid  streets,  the  quick 
glimpses  of  rows  of  pretentious  but  fearfully  dirty  and 
uninteresting  houses  —  to  the  great  open  space  to  the 
east  of  Chicago  —  nature's  assurance  of  fresh  air  and 
light  and  health  to  one  of  the  really  vast  cluster-holds 
of  mankind.  To  him  the  lake  is  in  relief  —  even  in 
splendid  contrast  to  the  noise,  the  dirt,  the  streets  dark 
ened  and  narrowed  by  the  over-shouldering  construc 
tions  of  man.  From  the  intricate  and  the  confusing,  to 
the  simplicity  of  open  water  —  no  wonder  then  that 
Chicago  has  finally  come  to  appreciate  her  lake,  that  she 


200     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

seizes  upon  her  remaining  free  waterfront  like  a  hungry 
and  ill-fed  child,  that  she  builds  great  hotels  and  office- 
buildings  where  their  windows  may  look  —  not  upon  the 
town,  stretching  itself  to  the  horizon  on  the  prairie,  but 
upon  the  lake,  with  its  tranquillity  and  its  beauty,  the 
infinite  majesty  of  a  great,  silent  open  place. 

In  the  terminal  stations  of  the  city  you  first  begin  to 
divine  the  real  character  of  the  city.  You  see  it,  a  great 
crucible  into  which  the  people  of  all  nations  and  all  the 
corners  of  one  of  the  greatest  of  the  nations  are  being 
poured.  Pressing  her  nose  against  the  glass  of  a  win 
dow  that  looks  down  into  surpassingly  busy  streets,  over 
shadowed  by  the  ungainly  bulk  of  an  elevated  railroad, 
is  the  bent  figure  of  a  hatless  peasant  woman  from  the 
south  of  Europe  —  seeing  her  America  for  the  first  time 
and  almost  shrinking  from  the  glass  in  a  mixture  of 
fear  and  of  amazement.  Next  to  her  is  a  sleek,  well- 
groomed  man  who  may  be  from  the  East  —  from  an  At 
lantic  seaport  city,  but  do  not  be  too  sure  of  that,  for 
he  may  have  his  home  over  on  Michigan  avenue  and 
think  that  "  New  York  is  a  pretty  town  but  not  in  it 
with  Chicago."  You  never  can  tell  in  the  most  Amer 
ican  and  most  cosmopolitan  of  American  cities.  At  a 
third  window  is  a  man  who  has  come  from  South  Da 
kota.  He  has  a  big  ranch  up  in  that  wonderful  state. 
You  know  that  because  last  night  he  sat  beside  you  on 
a  bench  in  the  dingy,  busy  office  of  the  old  Palmer 
House  and  told  you  of  Chicago  as  he  saw  it. 

"  I've  a  farm  up  in  the  South  Dakota,"  he  told  you, 
in  brief.  "  This  is  my  first  time  East."  You  started 
in  a  bit  of  surprise  at  that,  for  it  had  always  occurred 
to  you  that  Chicago  was  West,  that  you,  born  New 
Yorker,  were  reaching  into  the  real  West  whenever  you 
crossed  to  the  far  side  of  Main  street,  in  Buffalo.  You 
looked  at  the  ranchman,  feeling  that  he  was  joking,  and 


CHICAGO  201 

then  you  took  a  second  look  into  his  tired  eyes  and  knew 
that  you  were  talking  to  no  humorist. 

"  The  first  real  big  town  that  I  ever  ran  into,"  he  said, 
in  his  simple  way,  "  was  Sioux  City,  and  I  set  up  and 
took  a  little  notice  on  it.  It  seemed  mighty  big,  but  that 
was  five  years  ago,  and  four  years  ago  I  took  my  stock 
down  to  Cudahy  in  Omaha  —  and  there  was  a  town. 
You  could  walk  half  a  day  in  Omaha  and  never  come 
to  cattle  country.  Just  houses  and  houses  and  houses 
—  an'  you  begin  to  wonder  where  they  find  the  folks 
to  fill  them.  This  year  I  come  here  with  the  beef  for 
the  first  time  —  an'  you  could  put  Omaha  in  this  town 
and  never  know  the  difference." 

After  that  you  confessed,  with  much  pride,  that  you 
lived  in  New  York  city,  and  you  began.  You  knew  the 
number  of  miles  of  subway  from  the  Bronx  over  to 
Brooklyn,  and  the  number  of  stories  in  the  Wool  worth 
building,  all  those  things,  and  when  you  caught  your 
breath,  the  stockman  asked  you  if  Tom  Sharkey  really 
had  a  saloon  in  your  town,  and  was  Steve  Brodie  still 
alive,  and  did  New  York  folks  like  to  go  down  to  the 
Statue  of  Liberty  on  pleasant  Sunday  afternoons.  You 
answered  those  questions,  and  then  you  told  the  stock 
man  more  —  of  London,  made  of  dozens  of  Omahas, 
where  the  United  States  was  but  a  pleasant  and  withal  a 
somewhat  uncertain  dream,  of  Paris  the  beautiful,  and  of 
Berlin  the  awfully  clean.  When  you  were  done,  you 
went  with  the  stockman  to  eat  in  a  basement  —  that  is 
the  Chicago  idea  of  distinction  in  restaurants  —  and  he 
took  you  to  a  lively  show  afterwards. 

Now  you  never  would  have  wandered  into  a  Broad 
way  hotel  lobby  and  made  the  acquaintance  of  a  perfect 
stranger,  dined  with  him  and  spent  the  evening  with 
him  —  no,  not  even  if  you  were  a  Chicagoan  and  fear 
fully  lonely  in  New  York.  It  is  the  Chicago  that  gets 
into  a  New  Yorker's  veins  when  he  comes  within  her 


202     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

expanded  limits,  it  is  the  unseen  aura  of  the  West  that 
creeps  as  far  east  as  the  south  tip  of  Lake  Michigan. 
It  made  you  acknowledge  with  hearty  appreciation  the 
"  good  mornings "  of  each  man  as  he  filed  into  the 
wash-room  of  the  sleeping  car  in  the  early  morning. 
You  never  say  "  good  morning"  to  strangers  in  the 
sleeping  cars  going  from  New  York  over  to  Boston. 
For  that  is  the  East  and  that  is  different. 

A  Chicago  man  sits  back  in  the  regal  comfort  of  a 
leather-padded  office  chair  and  tells  you  between  hurried 
bites  of  the  lunch  that  has  been  placed  upon  his  desk,  of 
the  real  town  that  is  sprawled  along  the  Lake  Michigan 
shore. 

"  Don't  know  as  you  particularly  care  for  horse- food," 
he  apologizes,  between  mouthfuls,  "  but  that's  the  cult 
in  this  neck-o'-woods  nowadays." 

"  The  cult  ?  "  you  inquire,  as  he  plunges  more  deeply 
in  his  bran-mash. 

"  Precisely,"  he  nods.  "  We're  living  in  cults  out  here 
now.  We've  got  Boston  beaten  to  culture." 

He  shoves  back  the  remnant  of  his  "  health  food " 
luncheon  with  an  expression  that  surely  says  that  he 
wishes  it  was  steak,  smothered  with  onions  and  flanked 
by  an  ample-girthed  staff  of  vegetables,  and  faces  you  — 
you  New  Yorker  —  with  determination  to  set  your  path 
straight. 

"  Along  in  the  prehistoric  ages  —  which  in  Chicago 
means  about  the  time  of  the  World's  Fair  —  we  were 
trying  to  live  up  to  anything  and  everything,  but  par 
ticularly  the  ambition  to  be  the  overwhelmingest  biggest 
town  in  creation,  and  to  make  your  old  New  York  look 
like  an  annexed  seaport.  We  had  no  cults,  no  woman's 
societies,  nothing  except  a  lot  of  men  making  money 
hand  over  fist,  killing  hogs,  and  building  cars  and  selling 
stuff  at  retail  by  catalogues.  We  were  not  aesthetic 


CHICAGO  203 

and  we  didn't  particularly  care.  We  liked  plain  shows 
as  long  as  the  girls  in  them  weren't  plain,  and  we  had 
a  motto  that  a  big  lady  carried  around  on  a  shield.  The 
motto  was  '  I  will/  and  translated  it  meant  to  the  bot 
tom  of  the  sea  with  New  York  or  St.  Louis  or  any  other 
upstart  town  that  tried  to  live  on  the  same  side  of  the 
earth  as  Chicago.  We  were  going  to  have  two  million 
population  inside  of  two  years  and — " 

He  dives  again  into  his  cultish  lunch  and  after  a  mo 
ment  resumes : 

"  The  big  lady  has  lost  her  job  and  we've  thrown  the 
shield  —  motto  and  all  —  into  the  lake.  We're  trying 
to  forget  the  motto  and  that's  why  we've  got  the  cult 
habit.  We're  class  and  we're  close  on  the  heels  of  you 
New  Yorkers  —  only  last  winter  they  began  to  pass  the 
French  pastry  around  on  a  tray  at  my  club.  We  learn 
quickly  and  then  go  you  one  better.  We've  finally  given 
Jane  Addams  the  recognition  and  the  support  that  she 
should  have  had  a  dozen  years  ago.  We're  strong  and 
we're  sincere  for  culture  —  the  university  to  the  south 
of  us  has  had  some  funny  cracks  but  that  is  all  history. 
Together  with  the  one  to  the  north  of  us,  they  are  finally 
institutions  —  and  Chicago  respects  them  as  such. 

"  Take  opera.  We  used  to  think  it  was  a  fad  to  hear 
good  music,  and  only  the  society  folks  went  to  hear  it 
—  so  that  the  opera  fairly  starved  to  death  when  it 
came  out  here.  Now  they  are  falling  over  one  another 
to  get  into  the  Auditorium,  and  our  opera  company  is 
not  only  an  institution  but  you  New  Yorkers  would  give 
your  very  hearts  to  have  it  in  your  own  big  opera  house." 

"  You'll  build  an  opera  house  out  here  then,"  you  ven 
ture,  "  the  biggest  — " 

He  interrupts. 

"  Not  necessarily  the  biggest,"  he  corrects,  "  but  as  fine 
as  the  very  best." 

The  talk  changes.     You  are  frankly  interested  in  the 


204     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

cults.  You  have  heard  of  how  one  is  working  in  the 
public  schools,  how  the  school  children  of  Chicago  work 
in  classrooms  with  the  windows  wide  open,  and  you  ask 
him  about  it. 

"  It  must  be  fine  for  the  children  ?  "  you  finally  ven 
ture. 

"  It  is,"  he  says.  "  My  daughter  teaches  in  a  school 
down  Englewood  way,  and  she  says  that  it  is  fine  for 
the  children  —  but  hell  on  the  teachers.  They  weren't 
trained  to  it  in  the  beginning." 

You  are  beginning  to  understand  Chicago.  A  half 
an  hour  ago  you  could  not  have  understood  how  a  man 
like  this  —  head  of  a  giant  corporation  employing  half 
a  hundred  thousand  workmen,  a  man  with  three  or  four 
big  houses,  a  stable  full  of  automobiles,  a  man  of  vast 
resources  and  influences  —  would  have  his  daughter 
teaching  in  a  public  school.  You  are  beginning  to  un 
derstand  the  man  —  the  man  who  is  typical  of  Chicago. 
You  come  to  know  him  the  more  clearly  as  he  tells 
you  of  the  city  that  he  really  loves.  He  tells  you  how 
Sorolla  "  caught  on  "  over  at  the  Institute  —  although 
more  recently  the  Cubists  rather  dimmed  the  brilliance 
of  the  Spaniard's  reception  —  and  how  the  people  who 
go  to  the  Chicago  libraries  are  reading  less  fiction  and 
more  solid  literature  all  the  while.  Then  —  of  a  sud 
den,  for  he  realizes  that  he  must  be  back  again  into  the 
grind  and  the  routine  of  his  work  —  he  turns  to  you 
and  says: 

"  And  yesterday  we  had  the  big  girl  and  the  motto. 
It  was  hardly  more  than  yesterday  that  we  thought  that 
population  counted,  that  acreage  was  a  factor  in  the 
consummation  of  a  great  city." 

So  you  see  that  Chicago  is  only  America,  not  boastful, 
not  arrogant,  but  strong  in  her  convictions,  strong  in 
her  sincerity,  strong  in  her  poise  between  right  and 


CHICAGO  205 

power  together,  and  not  merely  power  without  right. 
A  city  set  in  the  heart  of  America  must  certainly  take 
strong  American  tone,  no  matter  how  many  foreigners 
New  York's  great  gateway  may  pour  into  her  ample  lap 
in  the  course  of  a  single  twelvemonth.  Chicago  has 
taken  that  dominating  tone  upon  herself. 

She  is  a  great  city.  Her  policemen  wear  star-shaped 
badges  after  the  fashion  of  country  constables  in  rural 
drama,  and  her  citizens  call  the  trolleys  that  run  after 
midnight  "  owl  cars,"  but  she  is  a  great  city  none  the 
less  for  these  things.  Her  small  shops  along  Michigan 
avenue  have  the  smartness  of  Paris  or  of  Vienna,  the 
greatest  of  her  department  stores  is  one  of  the  greatest 
department  stores  in  all  the  land,  which  means  in  the 
whole  world.  It  is  softly  carpeted,  floor  upon  floor,  and 
the  best  of  Chicago  delights  to  lunch  upon  one  of  its 
upper  floors.  Chicago  likes  to  go  high  for  its  meals 
or  else,  as  we  have  already  intimated,  down  into  base 
ments.  The  reason  for  this  last  may  be  that  one  of  the 
world's  greatest  restauranteurs,  who  had  his  start  in 
the  city  by  Lake  Michigan,  has  always  had  his  place 
below  sidewalk  level  on  a  busy  corner  of  the  city. 

The  city  is  fearfully  busy  at  all  of  its  downtown 
corners.  New  Yorkers  shudder  at  Thirty- fourth  street 
and  Broadway.  Inside  the  Chicago  loop  are  several 
dozen  Thirty-fourth  streets  and  Broadways.  There  you 
have  it  —  the  Chicago  loop,  designed  to  afford  mag 
nificent  relief  to  the  town  and  in  effect  having  tightly 
drawn  a  belt  about  its  waist.  The  loop  is  a  belt-line 
terminal,  slightly  less  than  a  mile  in  diameter,  designed 
to  serve  the  elevated  railroads  that  stretch  their  cater 
pillar-like  structures  over  three  directions  of  the  wide 
spread  town.  Within  it  are  the  theaters,  the  hotels,  the 
department  stores,  the  retail  district,  and  the  wholesale 
and  the  railroad  terminals.  Just  without  it  is  an  arid 
belt  and  them  somewhere  to  the  north,  the  west  and 


2o6     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

the  south,  the  great  residential  districts.  So  it  is  a  mis 
take.  For,  with  the  exception  of  a  little  way  along  Mich 
igan  avenue  to  the  south,  the  loop  has  acted  against  the 
growth  of  the  city,  has  kept  it  tightly  girdled  within 
itself. 

"  Within  the  loop,"  is  a  meaningful  phrase  in  Chi 
cago.  It  means  congestion  in  every  form  and  the  very 
worst  forms  to  the  fore.  It  means  that  what  was  orig 
inally  intended  to  be  an  adequate  terminal  to  the  various 
elevated  railroads  has  become  a  transportation  abomina 
tion  and  a  matter  of  local  contempt.  For  you  cannot 
exaggerate  the  condition  that  it  has  created.  It  is  fear 
ful  on  ordinary  days,  and  when  you  come  to  extraordi 
nary  days,  like  the  memorable  summer  when  the  Knights 
Templar  held  their  triennial  conclave  there,  the  news 
papers  print  "  boxed  "  summaries  of  the  persons  killed 
and  injured  by  congestion  conditions  "  within  the  loop." 
That  takes  it  out  of  being  a  mere  laughing  matter. 

It  is  no  laughing  matter  to  folks  who  have  to  thread 
it.  Trolley  cars,  automobiles,  taxicabs,  the  long  lum 
bering  'buses  that  remind  one  of  the  photographs  of 
Broadway,  New  York,  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago  or 
more,  entangle  themselves  with  one  another  and  with 
unfortunate  pedestrians  and  still  no  one  conies  forward 
with  practical  relief.  The  'buses  are  peculiarly  Chicago 
institutions.  For  long  years  they  have  been  taking  pas 
sengers  from  one  railroad  station  to  another.  A  con 
siderable  part  of  Western  America  has  been  ferried 
across  the  city  by  Lake  Michigan,  in  these  institutions. 
For  Chicago,  with  the  wisdom  of  nearly  seventy-five 
years  of  growth,  has  steadily  refused  to  accept  the  union 
station  idea.  St.  Louis  has  a  union  station  —  and  bit 
terly  regrets  it.  Modern  big  towns  are  scorning  the  idea 
of  a  union  station;  in  fact,  Buffalo  has  just  rejected  the 
scheme  for  herself.  For  a  union  station,  no  matter  how 
big  or  how  pretentious  it  may  be  architecturally,  will 


CHICAGO  207 

reduce  a  city  to  way-station  dimensions.  St.  Louis  is 
a  big  town,  a  town  with  personality,  the  great  trunk  lines 
of  east  and  south  and  west  have  terminals  there ;  but  the 
many  thousands  of  travelers  who  pass  through  there  in 
the  course  of  a  twelvemonth,  see  nothing  of  her.  They 
file  from  one  train  into  the  waiting-room  of  her  glorious 
station  —  one  of  the  few  really  great  railroad  stations 
of  the  world  —  and  in  a  little  while  take  an  outbound 
train  —  without  ever  having  stepped  out  into  the  streets 
of  the  town. 

In  Chicago  —  as  it  is  almost  a  form  of  lese  majeste 
to  discuss  St.  Louis  in  a  chapter  devoted  to  Chicago  we 
herewith  submit  our  full  apologies  —  four-fifths  of  the 
through  passengers  have  to  be  carried  in  the  omnibuses 
from  one  of  the  big  railroad  stations  to  another.  They 
know  that  in  advance,  and  they  generally  arrange  to 
stop  over  there  for  at  least  a  night.  This  means  busi 
ness  for  the  hotels,  large  and  small.  It  also  means 
business  for  the  retail  stores  and  the  theaters.  And  it 
is  one  of  the  ways  that  Chicago  preserves  her  metro- 
politanism. 

And  yet  with  all  of  that  metropolitanism  —  there  is 
a  spirit  in  Chicago  that  distinctly  breathes  the  smaller 
town,  a  spirit  that  might  seem  foreign  to  the  most  im 
portant  city  that  we  have  between  the  two  oceans.  It 
is  the  spirit  of  Madison,  or  Ottumwa,  or  Jackson,  per 
haps  a  little  flavor  still  surviving  of  the  not  long-distant 
days  when  Chicago  was  merely  a  town.  You  may  or 
you  may  not  know  that  in  the  days  before  her  terrific 
fire  she  was  called  "  the  Garden  City."  The  catalpa  trees 
that  shaded  her  chief  business  streets  had  a  wide  fame, 
and  older  prints  show  the  Cook  County  Court  House 
standing  in  lawn-plats.  In  those  days  Chicago  folk 
knew  one  another  and,  to  a  decent  extent,  one  another's 
business.  In  these  days,  much  of  that  town  feeling 
remains.  You  sit  in  the  great  tomb-like  halls  of  the 


208     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Union  League,  or  in  the  more  modern  University  Club, 
perhaps  up  in  that  wonderful  bungalow  which  the  Cliff- 
dwellers  have  erected  upon  the  roof  of  Orchestra  Hall, 
and  you  hear  all  of  the  small  talk  of  the  town.  Smith 
has  finally  got  that  franchise,  although  he  will  pay  mighty 
well  for  it ;  Jones  is  going  to  put  another  fourteen-story 
addition  on  his  store.  Wilkins  has  bought  a  yacht  that 
is  going  to  clean  up  everything  on  the  lake,  and  then 
head  straight  for  laurels  on  the  Atlantic  seaboard.  You 
would  have  the  same  thing  in  a  smaller  western  town, 
expressed  in  proportionate  dimensions.  After  all,  the 
circle  of  men  who  accomplish  the  real  things  in  the  real 
Chicago  is  wonderfully  small.  But  the  things  that  they 
accomplish  are  very  large,  indeed. 

They  will  take  you  out  to  see  some  of  these  big  things 
—  that  department  store,  without  an  equal  outside  of 
New  York  or  Philadelphia  at  least,  and  where  Chicago 
dearly  loves  to  lunch ;  a  mail-order  house  which  actually 
boasts  that  six  acres  of  forest  timber  are  cleared  each 
day  to  furnish  the  paper  for  its  catalogue,  of  which  a 
mere  six  million  copies  are  issued  annually ;  they  will 
point  out  in  the  distance  the  stacks  and  smoke  clouds  of 
South  Chicago  and  will  tell  you  in  tens  of  thousands  of 
dollars,  the  details  of  the  steel  industry;  take  you,  of 
course,  to  the  stock-yards  and  there  tell  you  of  the  hor 
rible  slaughter  that  goes  forward  there  at  all  hours  of 
the  day  and  far  into  the  night.  Perhaps  they  will  show 
you  some  of  the  Chicago  things  that  are  great  in  an 
other  sense  —  Hull  House  and  the  McCormick  Open  Air 
School,  for  instance.  And  they  will  be  sure  to  show 
you  the  park  system. 

A  good  many  folk,  Eastern  and  Western,  do  not  give 
Chicago  credit  for  the  remarkable  park  system  that  she 
has  builded  up  within  recent  years.  These  larger  parks, 
with  their  connecting  boulevards,  make  an  entire  circuit 
around  the  back  of  the  town,  and  the  city  is  making  a 


CHICAGO  209 

distinct  effort  to  wrest  the  control  of  the  water-front 
from  the  railroad  that  has  skirted  it  for  many  years,  so 
that  she  may  make  all  this  park  land,  too  —  in  connec 
tion  with  her  ambitious  city  plan.  She  has  accomplished 
a  distinct  start  already  in  the  water-front  plan  along  her 
retail  shop  and  hotel  district  —  from  Twelfth  street 
north  to  the  river.  The  railroad  tracks  formerly  ran 
along  the  edge  of  the  lake  all  that  distance.  Now  they 
are  almost  a  third  of  a  mile  inland;  the  city  has  re 
claimed  some  hundreds  of  acres  from  the  more  shallow 
part  of  Lake  Michigan  and  has  in  Grant  Park  a  pleasure- 
ground  quite  as  centrally  located  as  Boston's  famous 
Common.  It  is  still  far  from  complete.  While  the 
broad  strip  between  Michigan  avenue  and  the  depressed 
railroad  tracks  is  wonderfully  trim  and  green,  and  the 
Art  Institute  standing  within  it  so  grimy  that  one  might 
easily  mistake  it  for  old  age,  the  "  made  ground  "  to  the 
east  of  the  tracks  is  still  barren.  But  Chicago  is  making 
good  use  of  it.  The  boys  and  young  men  come  out  of 
the  office-buildings  in  the  noon  recess  to  play  baseball 
there,  the  police  drill  and  parade  upon  it  to  their  heart's 
content,  it  is  gaining  fame  as  a  site  for  military  encamp 
ments  and  aviation  meets. 

Chicago  makes  good  use  of  all  her  parks.  You  look 
a  long  way  within  them  before  you  find  the  "  Keep  off 
the  Grass  "  signs.  And  on  Saturday  afternoons  in  mid 
summer  you  will  find  the  park  lawns  thronged  with 
picnic  parties  —  hundreds  and  even  thousands  of  them 
—  bringing  their  lunches  out  from  the  tighter  sections 
of  the  town  and  eating  them  in  shade  and  comfort  and 
the  cooling  breezes  off  Lake  Michigan.  For  Chicago 
regards  the  lake  as  hardly  more  than  an  annex  to  her 
park  system,  even  today  when  the  question  of  lake-front 
rights  is  not  entirely  settled  with  the  railroad.  On  pleas 
ant  summer  days,  her  residents  go  bathing  in  the  lake 
by  the  thousands,  and  if  they  live  within  half  a  dozen 


210     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

blocks  of  the  shore  they  will  go  and  come  in  their  bath 
ing  suits,  with  perhaps  a  light  coat  or  bath-robe  thrown 
over  them.  A  man  from  New  York  might  be  shocked 
to  see  a  Chicago  man  in  a  bathing  suit  riding  a  motor 
cycle  down  an  important  residence  street  —  without  the 
semblance  of  coat  or  robe ;  but  that  is  Chicago,  and  Chi 
cago  seems  to  think  nothing  of  it.  She  wonders  if  a 
man  from  Boston  might  not  be  embarrassed  to  see  a 
coatless,  vestless,  collarless,  suspendered  man  driving 
a  four-thousand-dollar  electric  car  through  Michigan 
avenue. 

Chicago  is  fast  changing,  however,  in  these  respects. 
She  is  growing  more  truly  metropolitan  each  twelve 
month  —  less  like  an  overgrown  country  town.  It  was 
only  a  moment  ago  that  we  sat  in  the  office  of  the  manu 
facturer,  and  he  told  us  of  the  Chicago  of  yesterday, 
of  the  big  girl  who  had  "  I  will "  emblazoned  upon  her 
shield.  There  is  a  Chicago  of  tomorrow,  and  a  hint  of 
its  glory  has  been  spread  upon  the  walls  of  a  single  great 
gallery  of  the  Art  Institute,  in  the  concrete  form  of 
splendid  plans  and  perspectives.  The  Chicago  of  to 
morrow  is  to  be  different;  it  is  to  forget  the  disadvan 
tages  of  a  lack  of  contour  and  reap  those  of  a  mag 
nificent  shore  front.  In  the  Chicago  of  tomorrow  the 
railroads  will  not  hold  mile  after  mile  of  lake-edge  for 
themselves,  the  elevated  trains  will  cease  to  have  a  merry- 
go-round  on  the  loop,  the  arid  belt  between  downtown 
and  uptown  will  have  disappeared,  great  railroad  termi 
nal  stations  and  public  buildings  built  in  architectural 
plan  and  relation  to  one  another  are  to  arise,  her  splen 
did  park  and  boulevard  system  is  to  be  vastly  multiplied. 

Chicago  looks  hungrily  forward  to  her  tomorrow. 
She  is  never  discouraged  with  her  today,  but  with  true 
American  spirit,  she  anticipates  the  future.  The  pres 
ent  generation  cares  little  for  itself,  it  can  tolerate  the 
loop  and  its  abominations,  the  hodge-podge  of  the  queer 


CHICAGO  211 

and  the  nouveau  that  distinguishes  the  city  by  the  lake 
in  this  present  year  of  grace.  But  the  oncoming  gener 
ations  !  There  is  the  rub.  The  oncoming  generations 
are  to  have  all  that  the  wisdom  and  the  wealth  of  today 
can  possibly  dedicate  to  them.  There,  then,  is  your 
Chicago  spirit,  the  dominating  inspiration  that  rises  above 
the  housetops  of  rows  of  monotonous,  dun-colored 
houses  and  surveys  the  sprawling,  disorderly  town,  and 
proclaims  it  triumphant  over  its  outer  self. 


13 

THE  TWIN  CITIES 

A  FINE  yellow  train  takes  you  from  Chicago  to 
St.  Paul  and  Minneapolis,  in  the  passing  of  a  single 
night.  And  if  you  ever  meet  in  the  course  of  your 
travel  the  typical  globe-trotter  who  is  inclined  to  carp 
at  American  railroads,  refer  him  to  these  yellow  trains 
that  run  from  Chicago  up  into  the  Northwest.  There 
are  no  finer  steam  caravans  in  all  the  entire  world.  And 
when  the  globe-trotter  comes  back  at  you  with  his  telling 
final  shot  about  the  abominable  open  sleepers  of  Amer 
ica  —  and  you  in  your  heart  of  hearts  must  think  them 
abominable  —  tell  him  in  detail  of  the  yellow  trains. 
For  a  price  not  greater  than  he  would  pay  for  a  room 
in  a  first-class  hotel  over-night,  he  can  have  a  real  room 
in  the  yellow  trains.  Like  the  compartments  in  the  night- 
trains  of  Europe?  No,  not  at  all.  These  are  real 
rooms  —  a  whole  car  filled  with  them  and  they  are  the 
final  and  unanswerable  argument  for  the  comfort  and 
luxury  of  the  yellow  trains. 

In  such  a  stateroom  and  over  smooth  rails  you  sleep 
—  sleep  as  a  child  sleeps  until  Lemuel,  the  porter,  comes 
and  tears  you  forth  by  entreaties,  persuading  you  that 
you  are  almost  upon  the  brink  of  —  not  St.  Peter  but  of 
St.  Paul.  Of  course,  Lemuel  has  let  his  enthusiasm 
carry  away  his  accuracy  —  even  a  porter  upon  a  yellow 
train  is  apt  to  do  that  —  but  you  have  full  chance  to 
arise  and  dress  leisurely  before  your  train  stops  in  the 
ancient  ark  of  a  Union  station  *  upon  the  river  level  at 

*  Since  the  above  was  written  word  has  come  of  the  destruction 
of  the  Union  station  by  fire,  an  event  which  will  not  be  regretted 
by  travelers  or  by  residents  of  the  place.  E.  H. 

212 


ST.  PAUL  — MINNEAPOLIS  213 

the  capital  of  the  state  of  Minnesota.  For  at  St.  Paul 
you  have  come  to  the  Mississippi  —  the  Father  of  Wa 
ters  of  legendary  lore.  If  you  have  only  seen  the  stream 
at  St.  Louis  or  at  New  Orleans,  polluted  by  the  muddy 
waters  of  the  Missouri  or  the  Ohio  or  a  dozen  sluggish 
southern  streams,  you  will  not  recognize  the  clear  north 
ern  river  flowing  turbulently  through  a  high- walled 
gorge,  as  the  Mississippi.  There  are  a  few  of  the  flat- 
bottomed,  gaily  caparisoned  steamboats  at  the  St.  Paul 
to  heighten  the  resemblance  between  the  lower  river  and 
the  upper,  but  that  is  all. 

St.  Paul  owes  her  birth  to  the  river-trade  neverthe 
less.  For  she  was,  and  still  is,  at  the  real  head  of  navi 
gation  on  the  Mississippi  and  in  other  days  that  meant 
very  much  indeed.  A  few  miles  above  her  levee  were 
the  falls  of  St.  Anthony  and  a  thriving  little  town  called 
Minneapolis  —  of  which  very  much  more  in  a  moment. 
From  that  levee  at  St.  Paul  began  the  first  railroad  build 
ing  into  the  then  unknown  country  of  the  Northwest. 
The  first  locomotive  —  the  William  Crooks  —  which  ran 
into  the  virgin  territory  is  still  carefully  preserved. 
And  the  man  who  made  railroading  from  St.  Paul  into 
a  great  trunk  line  system  still  lives  in  the  town. 

He  began  by  being  assistant  wharfmaster  —  in  the 
days  when  there  was  something  to  do  in  such  a  job. 
Today  they  know  him  as  the  Empire  Builder.  The 
Swedes,  who  form  so  important  a  factor  in  the  popula 
tion  of  the  Twin  Cities,  call  him  "  Yem  Hill "  and  he 
loves  it.  But  he  is  entered  in  all  records  as  James  J. 
Hill. 

To  tell  the  story  of  the  growth  of  Jim  Hill  from 
wharfmaster  to  master  of  the  railroads,  would  be  to  tell 
the  story  of  one  of  the  two  or  three  really  great  men 
who  are  living  in  America  today.  It  is  a  story  closely 
interwoven  with  the  story  of  St.  Paul,  the  struggling 
town  to  which  he  came  while  yet  a  mere  boy.  He  has 


214     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

lived  to  see  St.  Paul  become  an  important  city,  the  rival 
village  at  the  falls  of  St.  Anthony  even  exceed  her  in 
size  and  in  commercial  importance,  but  his  affection  for 
the  old  river  town  to  which  he  has  given  so  much  of  his 
life  and  abundant  personality  has  not  dimmed.  He  has 
made  it  the  gateway  of  his  Northwest  and  when  one 
says  "  Hill's  Northwest "  he  says  it  advisedly ;  for  while 
there  might  have  been  a  Northwest  without  Jim  Hill, 
there  would  have  been  no  Jim  Hill  without  the  North 
west. 

He  found  it  a  raw  and  little  known  land  over  which 
stretched  a  single  water-logged  railroad  fighting  adver 
sity,  and  in  momentary  danger  of  extinction  through 
receivership;  a  trunk-line  railroad  at  that  time  dis 
tinguished  more  for  its  arrogance  than  for  any  other 
one  feature  of  its  being.  Somewhere  in  the  late  eighties 
J.  J.  Hill  took  a  trip  over  that  railroad.  He  saw  Seattle 
for  the  first  time  and  found  it  a  mere  lumber-shipping 
town  of  but  a  few  thousand  population  and  with  but 
little  apparent  future.  He  saw  great  stretches  of  open 
country  —  whole  counties  the  size  of  the  majestic  states 
of  New  York  and  of  Pennsylvania  and  still  all  but  un 
known.  He  also  saw  unbridled  streams,  high-seated 
mountain  ranges  and  because  J.  J.  Hill  was  a  dreamer  he 
saw  promise  in  these  things. 

From  that  trip  he  returned  to  the  budding  city  of  St. 
Paul,  enthused  beyond  ordinary  measure,  and  determined 
that  in  the  coming  development  of  the  half-dozen  terri 
tories  at  the  northwestern  corner  of  the  country  he  would 
share  no  ordinary  part.  He  turned  his  back  on  the 
navigation  of  the  Mississippi  —  already  beginning  to 
wane  —  and  gave  his  attention  to  railroading.  Purchas 
ing  an  inconsequential  lumber  railroad  in  Minnesota,  he 
laid  the  foundations  for  his  Great  Northern  system. 
There  was  a  something  about  Jim  Hill  in  those  earlier 
days  by  which  he  could  give  his  enthusiasm  and  his  lofty 


ST.  PAUL  — MINNEAPOLIS  215 

inspiration  to  those  with  whom  he  came  in  contact. 
That  rare  faculty  was  his  salvation.  Men  listened  to 
the  confident  talker  from  St.  Paul  and  then  placed  their 
modest  savings  at  his  disposal.  They  have  not  regretted 
their  steps.  The  Great  Northern,  through  Hill's  care 
ful  leadership  has,  despite  much  of  the  sparse  territory 
through  which  it  passes,  become  one  of  the  great  con 
servative  railroad  properties  of  the  United  States. 

But  Hill  did  more.  He  took  that  earlier  system  — 
the  Northern  Pacific,  so  closely  allied  to  his  territory  — 
and  made  it  hardly  second  in  efficiency  to  the  Great 
Northern  itself.  Both  of  these  great  railroads  of  the 
Northwest  have  never  reached  farther  east  than  St. 
Paul,  which  Hill,  with  that  fine  sentiment  which  is  so 
important  a  part  of  his  nature,  has  been  pleased  to  main 
tain  as  the  gateway  city  of  his  own  part  of  the  land. 
But,  while  he  has  been  a  most  helpful  citizen  of  St.  Paul, 
he  has  not  hesitated  to  dominate  her.  A  few  years  ago 
when  the  Metropolitan  company  presenting  grand  opera 
came  to  St.  Paul,  it  was  Hill  who  headed  the  subscrip 
tion  list  for  a  guarantee  —  headed  it  with  a  good  round 
figure.  Three  days  before  the  opening  night  of  the  opera 
he  walked  into  the  passenger  office  of  the  linking  rail 
road  that  he  owned  between  the  Twin  Cities  and  Chi 
cago.  The  singers  were  scheduled  to  come  from 
Chicago. 

"  Are  you  going  to  bring  the  troupe  up  in  extra  cars 
or  in  a  special  train  ?  "  he  demanded,  in  his  peremptory 
fashion. 

There  was  confusion  in  that  office,  and  finally  it  was 

explained  to  him  that  a  rival  line,  the  M ,  had  been 

given  the  haul  of  the  special  train,  as  a  return  courtesy 
for  having  placed  its  advertisement  on  the  rear  cover 
of  the  opera  programmes.  Hill's  muscles  tightened. 

"  If  the  troupe  doesn't  come  up  over  our  road,''  he 
said,  "  I  will  withdraw  the  opera  subscription." 


216     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

The  M road  lost  the  movement  of  that  opera 

company. 

Hill  is  an  advertiser,  a  patient,  persistent  and  entirely 
consistent  user  of  public  print  in  every  form.  Of  the 
really  big  men  of  the  land  he  is  perhaps  the  most  acces 
sible.  His  door  swings  quickly  open  to  any  resident  of 
the  Northwest.  He  is  in  demand  at  public  dinners  in 
the  East  and  at  every  conceivable  function  in  his  own 
territory.  And  yet  those  folk  of  his  own  town  who  come 
to  know  Mr.  Hill  intimately  know  him  rather  as  a  great 
publicist,  no  poor  musician,  a  painter  of  real  ability,  and 
a  kind-hearted  neighbor.  His  house  in  Summit  avenue 
contains  one  of  the  finest  art  galleries  west  of  Chicago. 
In  this  rare  taste  for  good  art  he  is  not  unlike  the  late 
Collis  P.  Huntington,  or  Sir  William  C.  Van  Home,  the 
dominating  force  of  the  Canadian  Pacific. 

Hill  has  a  real  faculty  not  only  for  judging,  but  for 
executing  oil  paintings.  It  is  related  on  good  authority 
that,  having  been  a  member  of  a  committee  to  purchase 
a  portrait  of  a  distinguished  western  railroader,  he  found 
the  picture  as  it  hung  in  the  artist's  studio  in  Chicago  far 
from  his  liking. 

"  He's  missed  W 's  expression  entirely,"  said  the 

Empire  Builder.  And  so  saying  he  grasped  a  palette 
that  was  resting  on  a  table,  dove  his  brush  into  the  soft 
paints,  and  before  the  astonished  artist  could  recover 
enough  self-possession  to  protest,  Hill  was  deftly  at 
work  upon  the  canvas.  In  five  minutes  he  had  convinced 
the  little  committee  of  which  he  was  chairman,  that  the 
expression  of  the  portrait  had  been  lacking,  for  it  was 
Hill  who  made  that  portrait  so  speaking  a  likeness  that 
the  artist  received  warm  and  undue  praise  for  the  fidelity 
of  his  work. 

There  is  in  St.  Paul  —  a  city  of  wealthy  men  —  a  man 


ST.  PAUL  — MINNEAPOLIS  217 

who  is  even  wealthier  than  J.  J.  Hill.  His  name  is  Fred 
erick  Weyerheuser,  and  newspapers  have  a  habit  of 
speaking  of  him  as  the  Lumber  King.  Mr.  Weyerheuser 
does  not  court  publicity,  he  shrinks  from  invitations  to 
speak  at  public  dinners.  He  has  a  press  agent  whose 
chief  work  it  was  for  many  years  to  keep  his  chief  out 
of  the  columns  of  the  newspapers.  It  is  only  within  a 
comparatively  short  time  that  Weyerheuser  consented 
to  give  his  first  interview  to  the  press. 

He  is  quite  typical  of  the  conservatism  of  St.  Paul. 
Minneapolis  snaps  its  fingers  at  conservatism,  social  and 
business,  and  signs  of  progress.  But  Minneapolis  mort 
gages  her  downtown  business  property.  St.  Paul  does 
not.  The  two  towns  are  as  different  as  if  they  were  a 
thousand  instead  of  but  ten  miles  apart.  And  St.  Paul 
believes  that  Minneapolis  may  do  as  she  pleases.  St. 
Paul  has  a  reputation  to  preserve.  She  is  the  capital 
of  the  state  of  Minnesota  and  as  capital  her  pride  and 
her  dignity  are  not  slight. 

Perhaps  it  was  that  pride  that  made  her  set  forth  to 
build  a  capitol  that  should  stand  through  the  long  years 
as  the  Bulfinch  State  House  in  Boston  has  stood  through 
the  long  years  —  a  monument  to  good  taste,  restraint, 
real  beauty  in  architecture.  She  summoned  one  of  her 
native  sons  to  do  the  work.  He  was  unhampered  in  its 
details.  And  when  he  was  done  and  had  placed  it  upon 
a  sightly  knoll  he  must  have  been  proud  of  his  handi 
work.  In  years  to  come  the  Capitol  of  Minnesota  may 
become  quite  as  famous  as  the  capitols  of  older  states, 
and  the  name  of  Cass  Gilbert,  its  architect,  may  be  placed 
alongside  of  that  of  Bulfinch. 

St.  Paul  is  hardly  less  proud  of  her  Auditorium.  It 
is  really  a  remarkable  building  and  perhaps  the  first 
theater  in  the  land  to  be  operated  by  a  municipality,  al 
though  we  have  a  distinct  feeling  that  the  small  city  of 
Northampton,  Mass.,  has  also  accomplished  something 


218     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

of  the  sort.  But  the  St.  Paul  Auditorium  is  hardly  to 
be  placed  in  the  same  class  as  any  mere  theater.  It  is 
a  huge  building  although  so  cunningly  constructed  that 
within  ten  hours  it  can  be  changed  from  a  compact  the 
ater  into  a  great  hall  with  some  10,000  seats.  And  this 
change  can  be  effected,  if  necessary,  without  the  slight 
est  disturbance  to  the  audience. 

To  this  great  hall  come  grand  opera,  well-famed  ora 
tors,  conventions  of  state  and  national  bodies,  drama, 
concerts  of  every  sort  in  great  frequency  and  variety. 
Perhaps  no  entertainment  that  it  houses,  however, 
has  keener  interest  for  the  entire  city  than  the  free  con 
certs  that  are  given  each  winter.  Last  year  there  were 
five  of  these  concerts,  and  it  was  soon  found  that  the 
small-sized  auditorium  with  its  three  thousand  seats  was 
too  small.  It  became  necessary  to  utilize  the  entire 
capacity  of  the  structure.  The  concerts  were  immensely 
popular  from  the  beginning. 

They  were  but  typical  of  the  high  public  spirit  of  the 
capital  city  of  Minnesota,  a  spirit  which  showed  itself  in 
the  early  adoption  of  the  commission  form  of  city  gov 
ernment,  in  the  establishment  of  playgrounds  and  mod 
ern  markets,  in  the  buildings  of  the  great  public  baths 
on  Harriet  island,  in  the  development  of  a  half  hundred 
active  and  progressive  forms  of  modern  civic  endeavor. 
St.  Paul,  with  all  her  rare  flavor  of  history  and  her  great 
conservatism  can  well  be  reckoned  in  the  list  of  the 
modern  cities  that  form  the  gateways  of  what  was  once 
called  the  West  and  is  today  rapidly  becoming  an  inte 
gral  part  of  the  nation. 

The  first  time  that  we  ever  came  into  Minneapolis  was 
at  dusk  of  a  July  night  two  years  ago.  That  is,  it  might 
have  been  dusk  in  theory.  For  while  the  clocks  of  the 
town  spelled  "  eight,"  the  northern  day  hung  wonder 
fully  clear  and  wonderfully  sharp  —  a  twilight  that  was 


ST.  PAUL  — MINNEAPOLIS  219 

hardly  done  until  well  towards  ten  of  the  evening.  We 
came  out  of  the  somewhat  barn-like  Union  station,  found 
an  unpretentious  cab  and  drove  up  Nicollet  avenue  toward 
our  hotel. 

The  initial  impression  that  a  city  makes  upon  one  is 
not  easily  forgotten.  And  the  first  impression  that 
Nicollet  avenue  makes  upon  a  first-comer  to  Minneapolis 
cannot  easily  be  erased.  It  is  with  pleasure  that  a 
stranger  notes  that  it  has  not  been  invaded  by  street 
railroad  tracks.  The  chief  shopping  and  show-street  of 
the  largest  city  of  Minnesota  thereby  conveys  a  sense  of 
breadth  and  roominess  that  the  chief  streets  of  some 
other  fairly  important  American  towns  lack  utterly. 
And  we  distinctly  recall  that  upon  that  July  night  the 
cluster  lights  up  and  down  Nicollet  avenue  each  bore  a 
great  flower-box,  warm  and  summerlike  with  the  bright 
ness  of  geraniums.  In  the  windows  of  the  large  stores 
that  lined  the  avenue  were  more  window-boxes,  up  to 
their  seventh  and  eighth  floors.  The  entire  effect  was 
distinct  and  different  from  that  of  any  other  town  that 
we  have  ever  seen.  It  seemed  as  if  Minneapolis  at  first 
sight  typified  the  new  America. 

Nor  was  that  impression  lessened  when  a  little  later 
we  drove  out  in  the  softness  of  the  summer  night  to  see 
the  residence  streets  of  the  city  —  quiet,  shady  streets 
that  seem  to  have  been  stolen  from  older  eastern  towns ; 
drove  into  the  parks,  caught  here  and  there  the  strains 
of  bands,  saw  the  canoes  darting  here  and  there  and 
everywhere  upon  the  surface  of  the  park  lakes.  In 
other  cities  they  have  to  build  waterways  within  their 
parks  and  boast  to  you  of  the  way  in  which  they  have 
done  it.  In  Minneapolis  they  can  have  no  such  boast. 
For  they  have  builded  their  parks  around  their  lakes, 
and  a  man  can  have  a  sheet  of  water  instead  of  green 
sward  at  the  door  of  his  home  if  he  so  choose.  Where 
a  modern  canoe  shoots  across  the  waters  of  Lakes  Cal- 


\ 


220     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

houn  or  Harriet,  the  Indian  once  shot  his  birch-bark 
creation.  There  are  some  two  hundred  lakes  in  Henne- 
pin  county.  But  the  lake  of  all  lakes  —  the  joy  of  the 
residents  of  the  Twin  Cities  for  a  day's  outing,  Minne- 
tonka  —  was  the  favored  gathering  spot  for  the  council 
fires  of  the  Indian  tribes  for  many  miles  around.  Do 
not  forget  that  the  Falls  of  St.  Anthony  were  the  mak 
ing  of  Minneapolis  —  and  you  can  go  by  trolley  within 
the  half -hour  from  the  center  of  the  city  to  the  gentler 
Falls  of  Minnehaha  and  there  recount  once  again  the 
immortal  romance  of  Hiawatha. 

Minneapolis  has  all  but  forgotten  the  Falls  of  St. 
Anthony  —  despite  the  fact  that  they  were  the  very 
cause  of  her  existence.  They  are  hemmed  in  by  great 
flouring-mills,  great  dusty,  unceasing  engines  of  indus 
try  with  a  capacity  of  some  eighty  thousand  barrels  a 
day,  and  even  if  you  steal  your  way  to  them  across  one 
of  the  roadway  bridges  over  the  turbulent  Mississippi 
you  will  find  them  lost  beneath  the  artificial  works  that 
turn  their  energy  to  the  aid  of  man.  The  roar  of  the 
great  Falls  of  St.  Anthony  are  the  roar  of  the  flouring- 
mills,  their  energy,  the  bread-stuff  of  the  nation. 

Minneapolis  does  not  affect  to  forget  entirely  her 
mother  river.  For  a  long  time  it  irritated  her  that  St. 
Paul  should  be  regarded  as  the  head  of  navigation  upon 
the  Mississippi,  and  within  the  past  twenty  years  she 
has  put  the  Federal  government  to  much  trouble  and 
incidentally  the  expenditure  of  something  over  a  million 
dollars,  to  make  herself  a  maritime  city.  A  ship-chan 
nel  has  been  dredged,  locks  put  in,  draws  cut  in  the  rail 
road  bridges  but  all  apparently  without  a  very  definite 
purpose  in  mind  —  save  possible  holding  her  own  in  the 
expenditure  of  the  annual  rivers  and  harbors  appropri 
ation.  For  one  can  hardly  imagine  water  commerce 
coming  in  great  volume  to  the  docks  of  Minneapolis,  the 
one  exclusive  glory  of  St.  Paul  —  passed  long  ago  by  her 


ST.  PAUL  — MINNEAPOLIS  221 

greatest  rival  in  the  commercial  race  of  the  Northwest 
—  stolen  from  the  older  town.  But  one  could  hardly 
have  driven  out  from  the  brisk  little  city  of  St.  Paul 
forty  years  ago  to  the  straggling  mill  village  at  the  Falls 
of  St.  Anthony  and  imagined  that  in  the  second  decade 
of  the  twentieth  century  it  would  have  become  a  city  of 
more  than  three  hundred  thousand  souls.  The  men  who 
are  today  active  in  the  affairs  of  the  city  have  seen  her 
grow  from  a  straggling  town  into  a  city  of  almost  first 
rank. 

Here  was  one  of  them  who  sat  the  other  day  in  the 
well-ordered  elegance  of  the  Minneapolis  Club  —  a  struc 
ture  instantly  comparable  with  the  finest  club-houses  of 
New  York  or  Boston  or  Philadelphia  —  who  admitted 
that  he  had  seen  the  town  grow  from  eight  thousand  to 
over  three  hundred  thousand  population,  the  receipts  of 
his  own  fine  business  increase  from  eighty-eight  to 
twenty-two  thousand  dollars  a  day.  But  he  was  a  mod 
est  man,  far  more  modest  than  many  of  these  western 
captains  of  industry,  and  he  quickly  turned  the  talk  from 
himself  and  to  the  commercial  importance  of  the  town 
with  which  he  was  pressing  forward.  Still  he  delighted 
in  statistics  and  the  fact  that  Minneapolis  "  was  doing  a 
wholesale  business  of  $300,000,000  a  year  "  seemed  to 
give  him  an  immense  and  personal  pride. 

But  do  not  believe  that  Minneapolis  is  all  commercial 
—  and  nothing  else.  A  quick  ride  through  those  shaded 
streets  and  lake-filled  parks  will  convince  you  that  she 
is  a  home-city;  a  cursory  glance  of  the  University  of 
Minnesota,  so  cleverly  located  that  she  may  share  it  with 
her  rival  twin,  together  with  an  inspection  of  her  schools, 
large  and  small,  would  make  you  believe  that  she  is  a 
city  that  prides  herself  upon  being  well  educated.  The 
dominant  strain  of  Norse  blood  that  the  Swedish  immi 
grants  have  been  bringing  her  for  more  than  half  a  cen 
tury  is  a  strain  that  calls  for  education  —  and  makes  the 


222     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

call  in  no  uncertain  fashion.  And  when  you  come  to 
delve  into  the  details  of  her  living  you  will  make  sure 
that  she  is  a  well-governed  city.  She  has  not  gone  deeply 
into  what  she  calls  "  the  fads  of  municipal  government  " 
but  she  is  a  town  which  offers  security  and  comfort,  as 
well  as  pretty  broad  measure  of  opportunity,  to  her  resi 
dents.  And  in  no  better  way  can  you  gauge  the  sensible 
way  in  which  she  takes  care  of  her  residents  than  in  the 
one  item  of  the  street  railroad  system.  It  has  never 
been  necessary  for  either  St.  Paul  or  Minneapolis  to 
assume  control,  actual  or  subtle,  over  the  street  railroad 
property  which  they  share.  And  yet  each  has  a  street 
railroad  service  far  superior  to  that  of  most  American 
towns  —  with  the  possible  exception  of  Washington. 
The  traction  company  seems  to  have  assimilated  much 
of  the  breadth  of  spirit  that  dominates  the  Twin  Cities 
of  the  Northwest. 

Nor  can  you  assume  that  Minneapolis  is  content  to  be 
merely  commercially  alive,  well  educated  or  efficiently 
governed.  Down  on  one  of  the  quiet  business  streets  of 
the  city  is  a  printing-shop,  so  unique  and  so  very  dis 
tinctive  that  it  deserves  a  paragraph  here  and  now.  In 
that  printing  shop  is  published  a  trade  paper  of  the  mill 
ing  industry  which  has  to  make  no  apologies  for  its  ex 
istence,  and  a  weekly  newspaper  called  the  Bellman. 
Some  one  is  yet  to  write  an  appreciation  of  the  new 
weekly  press  of  America,  the  weekly  press  outside  of 
New  York,  if  you  please,  such  publications  as  the  Argo- 
.naut  of  San  Francisco ;  the  Mirror  of  St.  Louis,  the  Dial 
of  Chicago  and  the  Minneapolis  Bellman.  The  part 
that  these  papers  are  playing  in  the  making  of  a  broad 
and  cultured  America  will  perhaps  never  be  known ;  but 
that  it  is  a  large  part  no  one  who  reads  them  faithfully 
will  ever  doubt.  The  Bellman  holds  its  own  among 
this  distinguished  coterie.  Its  house  is  a  fit  temple  for 
its  soul,  and  you  may  gain  a  little  insight  into  that  soul 


ST.  PAUL  — MINNEAPOLIS  223 

when  you  are  bidden  to  join  its  staff  at  one  of  its 
Thursday  luncheons  at  the  dining-board  of  the  printing- 
house  —  a  fashion  quickly  and  easily  brought  from  Lon 
don  Punch  halfway  across  the  continent  and  into  Min 
neapolis. 

No  American  of  taste  or  appreciation  would  ever  go 
to  Minneapolis  and  miss  one  wonderful  shop  there  — 
no  huge  box-like  structure  rearing  itself  from  sidewalk 
edge  and  vulgarly  proclaiming  its  wares  through  the 
brilliancy  of  immaculate  windows  of  plate-glass,  but  a 
shadowy  structure,  set  in  a  lawn  and  giving  faint  but 
unmistakable  hints  of  the  real  treasures  that  it  holds. 
For  it  is  a  rare  shop,  indeed,  and  a  revelation  to  folk 
from  the  seaboard  who  may  imagine  that  the  interior 
of  the  land  is  an  intellectual  desolation. 

It  may  have  been  one  of  these  who  dined  a  little  time 
ago  at  a  house  in  one  of  these  shaded  streets  of  Min 
neapolis.  After  dinner  the  talk  drifted  without  apparent 
reason  to  painting,  and  the  man  from  the  seaboard  found 
his  host  in  sharp  touch  with  many  of  the  new  pictures. 
Definitely  the  talk  turned  to  Walter  Graves,  London's 
newest  sensation  among  the  portrait  painters,  and  the 
possibilities  of  his  succeeding  Whistler. 

The  Minneapolis  man  beckoned  the  guest  into  the  hall, 
and  pointed  silently  to  a  picture  hung  there.  It  was  a 
splendid  portrait  of  Whistler,*  painted  by  Walter  Graves. 

"  I  never  expected  to  find  a  picture  like  that  —  out 
here,"  frankly  stammered  the  man  from  the  seaboard. 

"  You  will  find  many  things  here  that  you  do  not  ex 
pect,"  was  all  that  the  man  from  Minneapolis  said. 

If  a  town  that  is  scarce  forty  years  old  can  accomplish 

*  Since  writing  the  above  we  have  been  led  to  believe,  by  a 
gentleman  from  Rochester  that  a  picture  of  Whistler  by  Graves 
is  no  great  prize.  He  says  that  he  can  buy  them  by  the  dozen  at 
a  certain  London  shop.  Because  we  claim  no  wit  as  an  art 
critic  we  take  no  sides  in  this  matter.  The  facts  are  here.  You 
may  choose  for  yourself.  E.  H. 


224     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

these  things,  how  long  will  it  be  before  the  older  cities 
of  the  land  will  have  to  look  sharply  as  to  their  laurels? 
The  new  cities  of  America  are  to  be  a  force  in  her  in 
tellectual  progress  not  to  be  under-estimated  or  de 
spised. 


14 
THE  GATEWAY  OF  THE  SOUTHWEST 

THERE  are  three  great  cities,  or  rather  three 
groups  of  great  cities,  along  the  course  of  the 
Mississippi.  To  the  north  are  St.  Paul  and  Minneapolis, 
while  far  to  the  south  is  New  Orleans,  to  which  we  will 
come  in  the  due  order  of  things.  Between  these  St. 
Louis  stands,  close  to  the  business  center  of  the  land. 
For  nearly  twenty  miles  she  sprawls  herself  along  the 
west  bank  of  the  Mississippi.  Throughout  her  central 
portion  she  extends  for  a  dozen  miles  straight  back  from 
her  once  busy  levee.  She  is  a  great  city,  a  very  great 
city,  in  wealth,  in  industry,  in  resource.  And  yet  she 
is  a  rather  unimpressive  city  to  the  eye,  at  first  sight 
and  at  last. 

It  takes  even  a  seasoned  traveler  some  time  to  get  used 
to  that.  If  he  dreams  of  St.  Louis  as  a  French  city  and 
preserving  something  of  the  French  atmosphere,  as  do 
New  Orleans  and  Quebec,  he  is  doomed  to  utter  dis 
appointment.  Save  for  a  few  tatterdemalion  cottages 
down  in  Carondolet,  at  the  south  tip  of  the  town,  there 
is  no  trace  of  the  builders  of  the  city  to  which  they  gave 
the  name  of  one  of  their  kings.  And  if  he  has  heard  of 
the  great  German  population  and  dreams  of  great  sum 
mer-gardens,  of  winter-gardens,  too,  with  huge  bands  and 
huge  steins,  he  is  doomed  to  no  less  disappointment. 
For  that  sort  of  thing  you  go  to  Milwaukee.  St.  Louis 
has  as  many  Germans  as  that  brisk  Wisconsin  city,  and 
the  largest  brewery  in  the  world,  but  she  has  never  spe 
cialized  in  beer-gardens.  She  is  old  and  yet  you  could 

225 


226     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

hardly  call  her  quaint.  There  are  rows  of  small  houses 
in  her  older  streets,  their  green  blinds  tightly  closed  as  if 
seemingly  to  escape  the  almost  endless  bath  of  soot  and 
cinders  that  falls  upon  them,  and  the  flat-bottomed 
steamboats  still  are  fastened  at  the  wharf -boats  along 
the  levee.  But  these  make  a  pitiful  showing  nowadays 
when  your  mind  compares  them  with  the  tales  of  ante 
bellum  days  when  there  were  so  many  of  them  that  they 
could  only  put  the  noses  of  their  bows  against  the  levees. 
But  tradition  still  rules  the  hearts  of  the  rivermen,  and 
the  Mississippi  steamboat  has  lost  none  of  those  fan- 
tastics  of  naval  architecture  that  has  endeared  it  to 
every  writer  from  Mark  Twain  down  to  the  present  day. 

The  streets  aroundabout  the  levee  are  mean  and  dirty, 
and  nowadays  as  silent  as  the  Sabbath.  Those  convivial 
resorts,  the  Widow's  Vow  and  the  Boatman's  Thirst 
have  long  since  ceased  to  exist.  As  this  is  being  written 
the  Southern  Hotel  has  closed  its  doors.  Cobwebs  are 
growing  through  its  wonderful  office,  and  the  glorious 
marble  stair  up  which  a  regiment  might  have  marched  is 
silent,  save  for  the  occasional  halting  steps  of  a  watch 
man.  The  old  Planters' —  than  which  there  was  no  more 
famous  hostelry  in  the  Mississippi  valley,  unless  we 
choose  to  except  the  St.  Charles  down  at  New  Orleans 
—  is  long  since  gone,  torn  away  twenty  years  ago  to 
make  room  for  a  new  Planters',  which  has  already  be 
gun  to  get  grimy  and  aged.  The  Lindell  went  its  way  a 
dozen  years  ago.  The  St.  Louis  of  the  riverman  is 
dead.  They  are  tearing  away  the  old  warehouses  from 
the  levees,  and  no  one  looks  at  the  Mississippi  any  more 
save  when  it  gets  upon  one  of  its  annual  rampages 
and  makes  itself  a  yellow  sea. 

But  do  not  for  an  instant  think  that  St.  Louis  herself 
is  dead.  There  are  other  hotels,  and  far  finer  than  those 
of  the  war-times  and  the  river-trade.  And  you  have 
only  to  walk  a  few  squares  back  from  the  levee  to  find 


ST.  LOUIS  227 

industry  flourishing  once  again,  solid  squares  of  solid 
buildings,  grimy,  commercial,  uncompromising,  but  each 
representing  commerce.  St.  Louis  is  still  the  very  center 
of  the  world  to  the  great  Southwest  and  to  her  it  pays 
its  tribute,  in  demands  for  merchandise  of  every  sort. 
That  is  why  she  builds  shoe-stores  and  dry-goods  stores 
and  wholesale  stores  of  almost  every  other  conceivable 
sort,  and  builds  them  for  eight  or  ten  or  twelve  stories 
in  height,  closely  huddled  together,  even  through  unim 
portant  side  streets.  That  is  her  reason  for  existence  to 
day  —  when  the  river-trade,  her  first  reason  for  growth 
and  expansion,  is  dead.  But  the  railroad  is  a  living, 
vital  force,  when  the  rivers  are  frozen  and  dead,  and 
railroads  slip  out  from  St.  Louis  in  every  possible  direc 
tion.  Their  rails  are  glistening  from  traffic,  and  there 
at  the  city  from  whence  they  radiate  Commerce  sits 
enthroned. 

For  you  must  look  upon  St.  Louis,  yesterday  and  to 
day,  as  essentially  a  commercial  city.  She  is  not  a 
cultured  city,  although  she  has  an  excellent  press,  in 
cluding  a  weekly  newspaper  of  more  than  ordinary  dis-~ 
tinction.  Still  you  will  find  few  real  bookshops  in  all 
her  many  miles  of  streets,  she  has  never  leaned  to  fads 
or  cults  of  any  sort;  but  she  measures  the  percentage 
which  a  business  dollar  will  earn  with  a  delightful  ac 
curacy.  She  is  a  commercial  city.  That  is  why  she  is 
to  the  casual  traveler  an  unimpressive  city,  although  we 
think  that  her  lack  of  a  dignified  main  street  in  her  busi 
ness  section  is  responsible  for  much  of  this  impression. 
In  other  years  Broadway  —  Fifth  street  upon  her  city 
plan  and  a  fearfully  long  thoroughfare  running  paral 
lel  to  the  river  —  ranked  almost  as  a  main  street  and  had 
some  dignity,  if  little  beauty.  But  today  St.  Louis,  like 
so  many  other  of  our  American  towns,  is  restless  and 
she  has  slipped  back  and  away  from  Broadway,  leaving 
that  thoroughfare  somewhat  forlorn  and  deserted  and 


228     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

herself  without  a  single  great  business  thoroughfare  — 
such  as  Market  street,  San  Francisco  or  State  street, 
Chicago.  Her  downtown  streets  are  narrow  and  as 
much  alike  as  peas  in  a  pod. 

And  yet  even  a  casual  traveler  can  find  much  to  in 
terest  him  in  St.  Louis.  Let  him  start  his  inspection  of 
the  levee,  let  romance  and  sentiment  and  memory  work 
within  his  mind.  Let  his  fancy  see  the  riverboats  and 
then  he,  himself,  inspect  one  of  them.  Here  is  one  of 
them,  gay  in  her  ginger-bready  architecture.  Her 
stacks  rise  high  above  her  "  Texas  "  but  they  are  placed 
ahead  of  her  wheel-house,  a  fancy  peculiar  to  the  old 
naval  architects  along  the  Mississippi.  She  is  driven 
by  sidewheels  and  if  our  casual  traveler  goes  upon  her 
he  will  find  that  each  sidewheel  is  driven  by  a  separate 
engine,  a  marvelous  affair  painted  in  reds  and  blues  and 
yellows.  With  one  engine  going  ahead  and  the  other 
reversed  a  really  capable  Mississippi  pilot  —  and  who 
shall  doubt  that  a  Mississippi  river  pilot,  even  in  these 
decadent  days,  is  ever  anything  less  than  capable — - 
could  send  the  boat  spinning  like  a  top  upon  the  yellow 
stream.  That  pretty  trick  would  hardly  be  possible  with 
one  of  the  flat-bottomed  stern  wheel  boats,  and  there 
still  are  hundreds  of  these  upon  the  Father  of  Wa 
ters  and  his  tributaries,  moving  slowly  and  serenely  up 
and  down  and  all  with  a  mighty  splashing  of  dirty 
water. 

If  you  are  a  casual  traveler  and  upon  your  first  visit 
to  the  Mississippi  valley,  you  will  make  a  mental  reserva 
tion  to  ride  upon  one  of  the  old  boats  before  you  leave 
St.  Louis.  They  may  not  be  there  so  very  many  more 
years.  The  steel  barges  have  begun  to  show  themselves, 
and  commerce  is  looking  inquiringly  at  the  idle  stream 
to  see  if  it  cannot  be  brought  into  real  efficiency  as  a 
transportation  agent.  And  before  you  leave  that  levee, 
with  the  grass  growing  up  between  its  ancient  stones, 


ST.  LOUIS  229 

you  will  find  a  very  small  and  a  very  dirty  sidewalk  that 
leads  from  it  up  into  and  upon  the  great  Eads  bridge. 

St.  Louis  does  not  think  very  much  of  the  Eads  bridge 
these  days.  Yet  it  was  only  a  few  years  ago  that  it 
was  bragging  about  that  wonderful  conception  of  the 
engineer  —  who  had  finally  spanned  the  lordly  Missis 
sippi  and  right  at  his  chief  city.  But  other  bridges  have 
come,  two  huge  ungainly  railroad  structures  to  the  north 
and  a  public  bridge  to  the  south  —  that  is,  it  will  be  a 
public  bridge  if  the  voters  of  St.  Louis  ever  cease  quar 
reling  about  it.  At  the  present  time  it  is  hardly  a  bridge, 
only  a  great  span  over  the  water  and  for  long  months 
absolutely  unprovided  with  approaches  because  the  tax 
payers  of  St.  Louis  refuse  to  vote  the  funds  for  its  com 
pletion.  So  it  is  that  the  Eads  bridge  is  today  but  a 
single  agency  out  of  three  or  four  for  the  spanning  of 
the  river ;  it,  too,  has  grown  grimy  in  forty  years  and  the 
railroad  travelers  who  come  across  through  its  lower 
deck  only  remember  that  from  it  there  leads  under  the 
heart  of  the  city  of  St.  Louis  one  of  the  smokiest  rail 
road  tunnels  in  existence  —  and  that  is  saying  much. 

But  the  fact  remains  that  it  was  the  first  structure  to 
span  the  river,  and  to  end  the  importunities  of  the  un 
speakable  ferry.  And  today  it  is,  with  all  of  its  grime, 
the  one  impressive  feature  of  downtown  St.  Louis.  It 
\is  the  only  wagonway  that  leads  from  the  sovereign 
state  of  Illinois  into  the  sovereign  city  of  St.  Louis. 
Across  its  upper  deck  passes  at  all  hours  of  the  day  and 
far  into  the  night  a  silent  parade  of  trolley  cars,  mule 
teams,  automobiles,  farm  trucks,  folk  of  every  sort  and 
description,  on  foot.  It  is  as  interesting  as  London 
bridge  and  a  far  finer  piece  of  architecture.  But  the 
modern  St.  Louis  has  all  but  forgotten  it,  save  when  it 
chooses  to  take  a  motor  run  across  the  Illinois  prairies. 

The  casual  traveler  finally  turns  his  back  upon  the 


23o     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

river  and  its  oldest  bridge,  although  not  without  some 
regret  if  any  real  sentiment  dwells  within  him.  He 
threads  his  way  through  the  narrow  streets  of  downtown 
St.  Louis  and  finally  he  enters  the  oldest  residential  part, 
the  streets  still  narrow  but  the  houses  of  rather  a  fine 
sort,  many  of  them  transformed  into  small  shops  or  given 
these  days  to  lodgers.  They  are  of  a  type  somewhat 
peculiar  to  the  town.  They  were  built  high  and  rather 
narrow  and  as  a  rule  set  upon  a  terrace  and  detached. 
Builded  of  brick,  the  fancy  of  those  old-time  architects 
seemed  to  turn  almost  invariably  to  a  fagade  of  marble, 
an  unblushing  and  unashamed  veneer  to  the  street,  with 
the  side  walls  humble  and  honest  in  dark  red  brick. 
Steps  and  lintels  were  of  marble  or  what  must  have  been 
marble  in  the  beginning.  A  Philadelphia  housewife  would 
quail  beneath  the  steady  rain  of  smoke  and  cinders  that 
falls  upon  St.  Louis. 

There  are  many  thousands  of  these  red-brick  and 
white-marble  houses,  finally  important  cross  streets,  such 
as  Jefferson  and  Grand,  and  then  you  come  into  the 
newer  St.  Louis  —  a  residential  district  of  which  any 
city  might  well  be  proud.  In  the  newer  St.  Louis  the 
houses  are  more  modern  and  more  attractive  perhaps, 
due  partly  to  the  fact  that  they  are  farther  away  from 
the  river  and  the  great  factories  and  railroad  yards  that 
line  it.  You  can  trace  the  varying  fads  in  American 
house  architecture  in  layers  as  you  go  back  street  by 
street  in  the  new  St.  Louis  —  Norman,  Italian  Renais 
sance,  American  Colonial,  Elizabethan  —  all  like  the 
slices  in  a  fat  layer-cake.  Some  of  the  more  preten 
tious  of  these  houses  are  grouped  in  great  parks  or  reser 
vations  which  give  to  the  public  streets  by  entrance  gates 
and  are  known  as  Westminster  place,  or  Vandeventer 
place,  or  the  like.  They  form  a  most  charming  feature 
of  the  planning  of  St.  Louis,  and  one  almost  as  distinc 
tive  as  the  tidy  alleys  which  act  as  serviceways  to  all 


ST.  LOUIS  231 

the  houses.  The  houses  themselves  are  almost  invariably 
set  in  lawns,  although  there  are  many  fine  apartments 
and  apartment  hotels.  The  fearful  monotony  of  the 
side  street  of  New  York  or  Philadelphia  does  not  exist 
within  the  town. 

At  the  rear  of  these  fine  streets  of  the  newer  St. 
Louis  stands  the  chief  park  of  the  town,  not  very  dis 
tinctive  and  famed  chiefly  as  the  site  of  the  biggest 
World's  Fair  that  was  ever  held,  "  considerably  larger 
than  that  Chicago  affair,"  your  loyal  resident  will  tell 
you.  Our  individual  fancy  rather  turns  to  Tower  Grove \ 
Park  and  the  Botanical  Gardens  just  adjoining  it.  1 
Tower  Grove  is  in  no  very  attractive  section  of  St. 
Louis,  and  as  an  example  of  landscape  gardening  it  is 
rather  lugubrious,  little  groups  of  stones  from  the  old 
Southern  Hotel,  which  was  burned  many  years  ago  and 
was  a  fearful  tragedy,  being  set  here  and  there. 
But  intangibly  it  breathes  the  spirit  of  St.  Louis,  and  hard 
by  is  the  Botanical  Gardens  that  Henry  Shaw  gave  to  the 
city  in  which  he  was  for  so  many  years  a  dominating 
figure.  And  for  even  a  casual  traveler  to  go  to  St.  Louis 
and  never  see  Shaw's  Gardens  is  almost  inconceivable./ 

In  the  first  place,  it  is  an  excellent  collection  of  plants 
and  of  trees  and  of  exceeding  interest  to  those  folk  who 
let  their  tastes  carry  them  that  way.  And  in  the  second 
place,  Henry  Shaw  was  so  typical  of  the  old  St.  Louis 
that  you  must  stop  for  a  moment  and  remember  him. 
You  must  think  of  the  steady  purpose  of  the  man 
visiting  all  the  great  gardens  of  Europe  and  then  seek 
ing  to  create  one  that  should  outrank  all  of  them,  in 
the  mud-bog  of  St.  Louis.  For  the  St.  Louis  of  war 
times,  the  St.  Louis  to  which  Shaw  gave  his  benefaction 
was  little  more  than  a  bog.  And  Americans  of  those 
days  laughed  at  parks.  True  there  was  Fairmount  Park 
in  Philadelphia,  but  the  Fairmount  Park  of  those  days 
was  a  fantastic  idea  and  hardly  to  be  compared  with  the 


232     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Fairmount  Park  of  today.  Henry  Shaw  went  much 
farther  than  the  banks  of  the  Schuylkill,  although  he 
must  have  known  and  appreciated  John  Bartram's  his 
toric  gardens  there. 

Shaw  was  only  forty  years  of  age  when  he  retired 
from  business.  He  had  saved  through  his  keen  business 
acumen  and  a  decent  sense  of  thrift,  a  quarter  of  a 
million  dollars  —  a  tremendous  fortune  for  those  days. 
He  was  quite  frank  in  saying  that  he  thought  that  $250,- 
ooo  was  all  that  a  man  could  honestly  earn  or  honestly 
possess,  and  he  retired  to  enjoy  his  fortune  as  best  it 
might  please  him  to  do.  He  traveled  far  and  wide 
through  Europe,  and  upon  one  of  the  earliest  of  those 
trips  he  visited  the  World's  Fair  of  1851,  at  the  Crystal 
Palace,  London;  one  of  the  very  -first  of  these  inter 
national  exhibitions.  He  was  impressed  not  so  much  by 
the  exhibits  as  by  the  fine  park  in  which  the  Crystal 
Palace  stood.  A  little  later  he  was  a  guest  at  Chatsworth 
House,  that  splendid  English  home  given  by  William  the 
Conqueror  to  his  natural  son,  William  Peveril,  and  he 
became  a  frequent  visitor  at  Kew  Gardens.  It  was  at 
that  time  he  decided  to  make  a  botanical  garden  out  of 
the  place  which  he  had  just  purchased  outside  of  St. 
Louis. 

Henry  Shaw  must  have  remembered  his  boyhood  days 
in  St.  Louis  and  the  wonderful  garden  of  Madame 
Rosalie  Saugrain.  In  those  earlier  days  St.  Louis  was 
small  enough  in  population  but  large  enough  in  the 
material  for  social  enjoyment.  The  French  element  was 
still  dominant,  although  Madame  Saugrain  was  com 
paratively  a  newcomer,  an  accomplished  lady  who  had 
brought  the  manners  and  tastes  of  Paris  into  the  wilds  of 
western  America.  Her  garden,  which  was  then  in  open 
country  beyond  the  struggling  town,  was  close  to  what 
is  today  Seventh  street,  St.  Louis.  Great  skyscrapers 
and  solid  warehouses  have  sprung  up  where  formerly 


A  luxurious  home  in  the  newer  St.  Louis 


ST.  LOUIS  233 

Madame's  roses  and  hollyhocks  bloomed,  and  one  would 
have  to  go  weary  blocks  to  find  a  spear  of  grass,  unless 
within  some  public  park. 

But  Shaw's  Gardens  still  exist,  although  their  founder 
lived  to  a  ripe  old  age  and  has  now  been  dead  a  quarter 
of  a  century.  Older  folk  of  St.  Louis  remember  him 
distinctly,  a  vigorous  and  seemingly  lonely  man,  un 
married,  but  who  seemed  to  be  content  to  live  alone  in 
his  great  house  in  the  Gardens,  giving  a  loving  and  a  per 
sonal  care  to  his  flowers  and  then,  as  dusk  came  on, 
invariably  sitting  in  his  room  and  reading  far  into  the 
night.  They  will  show  you  his  will  when  you  go  to  the 
museum  in  the  Gardens,  a  curious  old  document,  keenly 
prepared  and  devising  to  the  remaining  members  of 
his  family,  servants  and  intimates,  everything  from  im 
mensely  valuable  real  estate  in  the  very  heart  of  St. 
Louis  down  to  the  port  and  sherry  from  his  cellars. 
But  the  part  that  interested  St.  Louis  most  was  that  part 
which  gave  the  Gardens  to  the  towrn,  although  not  with 
out  restrictions.  And  the  old  Missouri  town  made 
Shaw's  Gardens  quite  as  much  a  part  of  its  existence  as 
its  County  Fair. 

The  St.  Louis  Fair  was  a  real  institution.  There  have 
been  far  greater  shows  of  the  kind  in  our  land,  but  per 
haps  none  that  ever  entered  more  thoroughly  into  the 
hearts  of  the  folk  to  whom  it  catered.  Every  one  in 
St.  Louis  used  to  go  to  the  Fair.  It  had  a  social  status 
quite  its  own.  When,  after  the  hot  and  gruelling  sum 
mer  which  causes  all  St.  Louis  folk  who  possibly  can 
to  flee  to  the  ocean  or  to  the  mountains,  they  came  home 
again  in  the  joys  of  Indian  summer  there  was  the  Fair 
—  up  under  the  trees  of  Grand  avenue  in  the  north  part 
of  the  town  —  to  serve  for  a  getting  together  once  again. 
It  had  served  that  way  since  long  before  wartime.  And 
with  it  ran  that  mighty  social  bulwark  of  St.  Louis,  the 
Procession  of  the  Veiled  Prophet.  One  night  in  "  Fair 


234     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Week  " —  locally  known  as  "  Big  Thursday  " —  was  an 
nually  given  to  this  pageant,  frankly  modeled  upon  the 
Mardi  Gras  festivities  at  New  Orleans.  Through  the 
streets  of  the  town  the  pageant  rolled  its  triumphal 
course,  all  St.  Louis  came  out  to  see  it,  and  afterwards 
there  was  a  ball.  To  be  bidden  to  that  ball  was  the 
social  recognition  that  the  city  gave  you. 

But  in  1904  there  came  that  greater  fair  —  the  Louis 
iana  Purchase  Exposition,  to  which  the  world  was  bid 
den.  It  was  a  really  great  fair  and  it  has  left  a  per 
manent  impress  upon  the  town  in  the  form  of  a  fine  Art 
Gallery  and  the  splendid  group  of  buildings  at  the  west 
edge  of  the  city  which  are  being  devoted  to  the  uses  of 
Washington  University.  But  the  big  fair  spelled  the 
doom  of  the  smaller.  The  town  had  grown  out  around 
its  grounds  and  they  were  no  longer  in  the  country. 
So  the  career  of  the  old  St.  Louis  Fair  ended  —  bril 
liantly  in  that  not-to-be- forgotten  exposition.  Although 
some  attempts  have  recently  been  made  to  reestablish 
it  in  another  part  of  the  town,  the  older  folk  of  St.  Louis 
shake  their  heads.  They  very  well  know  that  you  can 
not  bring  the  old  days  back  by  the  mere  waving  of  a 
wand. 

Upon  a  crisp  October  evening,  the  Veiled  Prophet 
still  makes  his  way  through  the  narrow  streets  of  the 
town.  The  preparations  for  his  coming  are  hedged 
about  with  greatest  secrecy,  and  the  young  girls  of 
St.  Louis  grow  expectant  just  as  their  mothers  and 
their  grandmothers  before  them  used  to  grow  expectant 
when  October  came  close  at  hand.  At  last,  expectancy 
rewarded  —  out  of  the  unknown  an  engraved  summons 
to  attend  the  court  of  a  single  night  —  with  the  engraved 
summons  some  souvenir  of  no  slight  worth ;  the  prophet's 
favor  is  a  generous  one. 

Absurd,  you  say?  Not  a  bit  of  it.  It  is  a  pity  that 
we  do  not  have  more  of  it  in  our  land.  We  have  been 


ST.  LOUIS  235 

rather  busy  grubbing;  given  ourselves  rather  too  much 
to  utility  and  efficiency,  to  the  sordid  business  of  merely 
making  money.  A  Veiled  Prophet  is  a  good  thing  for 
a  town,  a  Mardi  Gras  a  tonic.  It  is  an  idea  that  is 
spreading  across  America,  and  America  is  profiting  by 
it. 

This  is  a  personality  sketch  of  St.  Louis  and  not  a 
guide-book.  If  it  were  the  latter,  it  would  recount  the 
superb  commercial  position  of  the  city,  each  of  the 
bulwarks  of  its  financial  fortresses.  The  river-trade  is 
dead  indeed;  even  the  most  optimistic  of  those  who  are 
most  anxious  to  see  it  revived  doubt,  in  their  heart  of 
hearts,  if  ever  it  can  be  revived.  But  commerce  is  not 
dead  at  St.  Louis.  As  St.  Paul  and  Minneapolis  are 
gatewrays  to  the  Northwest  remember  that  she  is  one  of 
the  great  gateways  to  the  Southwest.  To  the  man  in 
Arkansas  or  Oklahoma  or  Texas  she  is  another  New 
York;  she  stands  to  him  as  London  stands  to  the  folk 
of  the  English  counties.  And  this  relation  she  capital 
izes  and  so  grows  rich.  She  is  solid  and  substantial  — 
I  the  old  French  town  of  the  yesterdays  has  taken  her  per>- 
J  manent  place  among  the  leading  cities  of  America. 


15 
THE  OLD  FRENCH  LADY  OF  THE  RIVERBANK 

AT  the  bend  of  the  river  she  stands  —  this  drowsy 
old  French  lady  of  the  long  ago.  They  have 
called  her  the  Crescent  City.  But  the  Mississippi  makes 
more  than  a  single  turn  around  the  wide-spreading  town. 
And  the  results  are  most  puzzling,  even  to  those  steady- 
minded  folk  who  assert  that  they  are  direction-wise. 
In  New  Orleans,  east  seems  west  and  north  seems  south. 
It  must  almost  be  that  the  Father  of  Rivers  reverses  all 
the  laws  of  Mother  Nature  and  runs  his  course  up 
stream. 

New  Orleans  is  upon  the  east  bank  of  the  Mississippi. 
All  the  guide-books  will  tell  you  that.  But  in  the  morn 
ing  the  sun  arises  from  over  across  the  river,  and  in  the 
cool  of  evening  his  reddish  radiance  is  dying  over  Lake 
Ponchartrain,  directly  east  from  the  river  —  at  least, 
so  your  direction-wise  intelligence  seems  to  tell  you. 
But  east  is  east  and  west  is  west  and  Old  Sol  has  made 
such  a  habit  of  rising  and  setting  these  many  thousand 
years  that  his  reliability  is  not  to  be  trusted.  As  to  the  re- 
liablity  of  the  Father  of  Waters  —  there  is  quite  another 
matter. 

Truth  to  tell,  the  Mississippi  river  is  probably  the 
most  utterly  unreliable  thing  within  the  North  American 
continent.  He  has  shifted  his  course  so  many  times 
within  the  brief  century  that  the  white-skinned  men 
have  known  him,  that  the  oldest  of  them  have  lost  all 
trace  of  his  original  course.  And  so  to  steer  a  vessel 
up  and  down  the  stream  is  a  doubly  difficult  art.  The 

236 


NEW  ORLEANS  237 

pilot  does  not  merely  have  to  know  his  steering-marks 
—  the  range  between  that  point  and  this,  the  thrust  of 
some  hidden  and  fearfully  dangerous  reef,  the  advantage 
to  be  gained  between  eddies  and  currents  for  easy  run 
ning —  he  has  to  learn  the  entire  thing  anew  each  time 
he  brings  a  craft  up  or  down  the  river.  Mark  Twain 
has  long  since  immortalized  the  ample  genius  of  the 
Mississippi  pilots.  The  stories  of  the  river's  unreli 
ability,  of  its  constant  tendency  to  change  its  channel 
are  apocryphal  —  almost  as  old  as  the  oldest  of  the  houses 
of  old  New  Orleans.  And  this  is  not  the  story  of  the 
river. 

Yet  it  must  not  be  forgotten  that  the  river  almost  is 
New  Orleans,  that  from  the  beginning  it  has  been  the 
source  of  the  French  lady's  strength  and  prosperity. 
Before  there  was  even  thought  of  a  city  the  river  was 
there  —  pouring  its  yellow  flood  down  from  an  unknown 
land  to  the  great  gulf.  Bienville,  the  real  founder  of 
New  Orleans,  saw  with  the  prophetic  sight  of  a  really 
great  thinker  what  even  a  river  that  came  to  the  sea 
from  an  unexplored  land  might  mean  in  years  to  come 
to  the  city  of  his  creation.  His  prophecy  was  right. 
When  the  river,  with  the  traffic  upon  its  bosom,  has 
prospered,  New  Orleans  has  prospered.  And  in  the  lean 
years  when  the  river  traffic  has  dwindled,  New  Orleans 
has  felt  the  loss  in  her  every  fiber.  There  are  old- 
timers  in  the  city  who  shake  their  heads  when  they  tell 
you  of  the  fat  river-boats  crowding  in  at  the  levee,  of  the 
clipper-ships  and  the  newer  steam-propelled  craft  at  the 
deeper  docks,  of  the  crowds  around  the  old  St.  Louis 
and  the  St.  Charles  Hotels,  the  congested  narrow  streets, 
the  halcyon  days  when  the  markets  of  the  two  greatest 
nations  in  the  world  halted  on  the  cotton  news  from 
Factors  Row.  And  New  Orleans  awaits  the  opening 
of  the  Panama  canal  with  something  like  feverish  an 
ticipation,  for  she  feels  that  this  mighty  nick  finally  cut 


238     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

into  the  thin  neck  of  the  American  continents,  her 
wharves  will  again  be  crowded  with  shipping  —  this  time 
with  a  variety  of  craft  plying  to  and  from  the  strange 
ports  of  the  Pacific.  So  much  does  her  river  still  mean 
to  her. 

Factors  Row  still  stands,  rusty  and  somewhat  grimed. 
No  longer  is  it  consequential  in  the  markets  of  the 
world.  In  fact,  to  put  a  bald  truth  baldly,  no  longer  is 
New  Orleans  of  supreme  consequence  in  the  cotton  prob 
lem  of  all  nations.  A  great  cotton  shipping  port  she 
still  is  and  will  long  remain.  But  the  multiplication  of 
railroad  points  and  the  rapid  development  of  such  newer 
cotton  ports  as  Galveston,  to  make  a  single  instance, 
have  all  worked  against  her  preeminence. 

This  is  not  a  story  of  the  commercial  importance  of 
New  Orleans,  either.  There  are  plenty  who  are  willing 
to  tell  that  story,  with  all  of  its  romantic  traditions  of  the 
past  and  its  brilliant  prophecies  for  the  future.  This  is 
the  story  of  the  New  Orleans  of  today,  the  city  who  with 
an  almost  reverential  respect  for  the  Past  and  its  monu 
ments  still  holds  her  doors  open  to  the  Present  and  its 
wonders. 

Of  the  Past  one  may  know  at  every  turn.  North  of 
Canal  street  —  that  broad  thoroughfare  which  ranks  as 
a  dividing  path  with  Market  street  in  San  Francisco  — 
the  city  has  changed  but  little  since  the  Civil  War. 
South  of  Canal  —  still  called  the  "  new "  part  of  the 
city  —  there  has  been  some  really  modern  development. 
Prosperous  looking  skyscrapers  have  lifted  their  lordly 
heads  above  the  narrow  streets  and  the  compactly  built 
"  squares "  which  they  encompass ;  there  are  several 
modern  hotels  with  all  the  momentary  glory  of  artificial 
marbles  and  chromatic  frescoes,  department  stores  with 
show  windows  as  brave  and  gay  as  any  of  those  in  New 
York  or  Chicago  or  Boston.  But  even  if  the  narrow 
streets  were  to  be  widened,  New  Orleans  would  never 


NEW  ORLEANS  239 

look  like  Indianapolis  or  Kansas  City  or  St.  Paul  — 
any  of  the  typical  cities  of  the  so-called  Middle  West. 
Too  many  of  her  stout  old  structures  of  the  fifties  and 
the  sixties  still  remain.  And  hung  upon  these,  uncom 
promising  and  triumphant,  are  the  galleries. 

The  galleries  of  New  Orleans !  They  are  perhaps  the 
most  typical  of  the  outward  expressions  of  a  town  whose 
personality  is  as  distinct  as  that  of  Boston  or  Charles 
ton  or  San  Francisco.  They  must  have  been  master 
workmen  whose  fingers  and  whose  ancient  forges  worked 
those  delicate  and  lacelike  traceries.  And  it  has  been 
many  thankful  generations  who  have  praised  the  prac 
tical  side  of  their  handicraft.  For  in  the  long  hot  sum 
mer  months  of  New  Orleans  these  galleries  furnish  a 
shade  that  is  a  delight  and  a  comfort.  On  rainy  days 
they  are  arcades  keeping  dry  the  sidewalks  of  the  heart 
of  the  town.  And  from  the  offices  within,  the  galler 
ies,  their  rails  lined  with  growing  things,  are  veri 
table  triumphs.  Once  in  a  great  while  some  one  will 
rise  up  and  suggest  that  they  be  abolished  —  that 
they  are  old-fashioned  and  have  long  since  served 
their  full  purpose.  That  some  one  is  generally  a  smart 
shopkeeper  who  has  drifted  down  from  one  of  these 
upstart  cities  from  the  North  or  East.  But  New  Or 
leans  is  smarter  still.  She  well  knows  the  commercial 
value  of  her  personality.  There  are  newer  cities  and 
showier  within  the  radius  of  a  single  night's  ride  upon 
a  fast  train.  But  where  one  man  comes  to  one  of  these, 
a  dozen  alight  at  the  old  French  town  by  the  bend  of  the 
yellow  river. 

"  Give  J a  few  French  restaurants,  some  fame 

for  its  cocktails  or  its  gin-fizzes  —  just  as  New  Orleans 
has  —  and  I  will  bring  a  dozen  big  new  factories  here 
within  the  next  three  years,"  said  the  secretary  of  the 
Chamber  of  Commerce  of  a  thriving  Texas  town  the 
other  day.  He  knew  whereof  he  spake.  And  now,  we 


240     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

shall  know  whereof  we  speak.  We  shall  give  a  moment 
of  attention  to  the  little  restaurants  and  the  gin-fizzes. 

Let  the  gin-fizzes  come  first,  for  they  are  nearly  as 
characteristic  of  the  old  town  as  her  galleries!  You 
will  find  their  chief  habitat  just  across  a  narrow  alley 
from  the  St.  Charles  Hotel.  There  is  a  long  bar  on  the 
one  side  of  the  room,  upon  which  stand  great  piles  of 
ice-bound  southern  oysters  —  twelve  months  of  the  year, 
for  New  Orleans  never  reads  an  "  R  "  in  or  out  of  her 
oyster-eating  calendar.  But  any  bar  may  bring  forth 
oysters,  and  only  one  bar  in  the  world  brings  forth  the 
real  New  Orleans  gin-fizz.  Two  enterprising  young 
men  stand  behind  the  bar-keepers  in  a  perpetual  shaking 
of  the  fizzes.  If  it  is  tantalizing  to  shake  that  whereof 
you  do  not  taste,  they  show  it  not.  And  in  the  hours  of 
rush  traffic  there  are  six  of  the  non-bar-keeping  bar 
tenders  who  give  the  correct  amount  of  ague  to  New 
Orleans'  most  delectable  beverage.  A  hustler  from  North 
or  East  would  put  in  electric  shakers  instanter  —  a 
thousand  or  is  it  ten  thousand  revolutions  to  the  minute  ? 
He  would  brag  of  his  electric  shakers  and  the  New 
Orleans  gin-fizz  would  be  dead  —  forever.  Romance 
and  an  electric  shaker  cannot  go  hand  in  hand. 

"  The  ingredients  ? "  you  breathlessly  interrupt. 
"  The  manner  of  the  mixing?  " 

Bless  your  heart,  if  the  Gin  Fizz  House  published  its 
close-held  secret  to  the  world,  it  would  lose  its  chief  ex 
cuse  for  existence  and  then  become  an  ordinary  drink- 
ing-place.  As  it  is,  it  holds  its  head  above  the  real 
variety  of  saloons,  even  above  the  polished  mahogany 
bar  of  the  aristocratic  hotel  across  the  narrow  street. 
For  its  product,  if  delightful,  is  still  gentle,  although 
insidious,  perhaps.  It  is  largely  milk  and  barely  gin. 
You  can  drink  it  by  the  barrel  without  the  slightest 
jarring  of  your  faculties.  And  it  is  rumored  that  some 
of  the  men  of  New  Orleans  use  it  as  a  breakfast-food. 


NEW  ORLEANS  241 

From  the  Gin  Fizz  House  to  the  Absinthe  House  is  a 
long  way, —  in  more  meanings  than  one.  The  Absinthe 
House  is  hardly  less  famed,  but  in  these  days  when 
drinking  has  largely  gone  out  of  fashion  and  worm 
wood  is  under  the  particular  ban  of  the  United  States 
statutes,  it  is  largely  a  relic  of  the  past.  It  stands  in  the 
heart  of  the  old  French  town  and  before  we  come  to 
its  broad  portal,  let  us  study  the  fascinating  quarter  in 
which  we  are  to  find  it. 

We  have  already  spoken  of  Canal  street,  so  broad  in 
contradistinction  to  the  very  narrow  streets  of  the  rest 
of  the  older  parts  of  the  town,  that  one  can  almost  see 
the  narrow  water-filled  ditch  that  once  traversed  it,  as 
the  dividing  line  of  the  city.  South  of  Canal  street,  the 
so-called  American  portion  of  the  city,  with  many  affec 
tations  of  modernity  —  north  of  that  thoroughfare  — 
curiously  enough  the  down-stream  side  —  the  French 
quarter,  architecturally  and  romantically  the  most  fasci 
nating  section  of  any  large  city  of  the  United  States. 
The  very  names  of  its  streets  —  Chartres,  Royal,  Bour 
bon,  Burgundy,  Dauphine,  St.  Louis  —  quicken  antici 
pation.  And  anticipation  is  not  dulled  when  one  comes 
to  see  the  great  somber  houses  with  their  mysterious 
and  moth-eaten  courtyards  and  the  interesting  folk  who 
dwell  within  them. 

We  choose  Royal  street,  heading  straight  away  from 
Canal  street  as  if  in  shrinking  horror  of  electric  signs 
and  moving-picture  theaters.  In  a  single  square  they 
are  behind  and  forgotten  and,  if  it  were  not  for  the  trol 
ley  cars  and  the  smartly  dressed  French  girls,  we  might 
be  walking  in  Yesterday.  The  side  streets  groan  under 
the  same  ugly,  heavy  patterns  of  Belgian  block  pave 
ment  that  have  done  service  for  nearly  a  century.  Orig 
inally  the  blocks  —  brought  long  years  ago  as  ballast  in 
the  ships  from  Europe  —  were  in  a  pretty  pattern,  laid 
diagonally.  But  heavy  traffic  and  the  soft  sub-strata  of 


242     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

the  river-bank  town  have  long  since  worked  sad  havoc 
with  the  old  pavements.  And  a  new  city  administra 
tion  has  finally  begun  to  replace  them  with  the  very  com 
fortable  but  utterly  unsentimental  asphalt. 

Here  is  the  Absinthe  House,  worth  but  a  single  glance, 
for  it  has  descended  to  the  estate  of  an  ordinary  corner 
saloon.  Only  ordinary  corner  saloons  are  not  ordinar 
ily  housed  in  structures  of  this  sort.  You  can  see  houses 
like  this  in  the  south  of  France  and  in  Spain  —  so  I 
am  told.  For  below  Canal  street  is  both  French  and 
Spanish.  Remember,  if  you  please,  that  the  French 
of  the  Southland  shared  the  same  hard  fate  of  their 
countrymen  in  that  far  northern  valley  of  the  great  St. 
Lawrence  —  neglect.  The  French  are  the  most  loyal 
people  on  earth.  Their  fidelity  to  their  language  and 
their  customs  for  nearly  two  centuries  proves  that. 
That  faith,  steadfast  through  the  tragedy  of  the  indif 
ference  and  neglect  of  their  mother  country,  doubly 
proves  it.  And  the  only  difference  between  the  French 
man  of  Quebec  and  the  Frenchman  of  New  Orleans 
was  that  in  the  South  the  Spaniard  was  injected  into  the 
problem.  But  the  Frenchman  in  the  South  was  not  less 
loyal  than  his  fellow-countryman  of  the  North.  A  dis 
solute  king  sitting  in  the  wreck  of  his  great  family  in 
the  suburbs  of  Paris  might  barter  away  the  title  of  his 
lands,  but  no  Louis  could  ever  trade  away  the  loyalty 
of  the  older  French  of  New  Orleans  to  their  land  and 
its  institutions.  In  such  a  faith  was  the  French  quar 
ter  of  the  city  born.  In  such  faith  has  it  survived,  these 
many  years.  And  perhaps  the  very  greatest  episodes  in 
the  history  of  the  city  were  in  those  twenty  days  of 
November,  1803,  when  the  French  flag  displaced  the 
Spanish  in  the  old  Place  d'Armes,  to  be  replaced  only 
by  the  strange  banner  of  a  newborn  nation  which  was 
given  the  opportunity  of  working  out  the  destiny  of  the 
new  France. 


NEW  ORLEANS  243 

So  it  was  the  Spaniard  who  took  his  part  in  the  shap 
ing  of  the  French  quarter  of  New  Orleans.  You  can 
see  the  impress  of  his  architects  in  the  stout  old  houses 
that  were  built  after  two  disastrous  and  wide-spread 
fires  in  the  closing  years  of  the  eighteenth  century  — 
even  in  the  great  lion  of  the  town;  the  Cabildo  which 
rises  from  what  was  formerly  the  Place  d'Armes  and 
is  today  Jackson  square.  And  the  old  Absinthe  House, 
with  its  curiously  wrought  and  half-covered  courtyard 
is  one  of  these  old-time  Spanish  houses. 

Now  forget  about  the  absinthe  —  as  the  rest  of  the 
French  folk  of  the  land  are  beginning  to  forget  it  — 
and  turn  your  attention  to  the  courtyards.  In  another 
old  Southern  city  —  Charleston  —  the  oldest  houses  shut 
the  glories  of  their  lovely-aging  gardens  from  the  sight 
of  vulgar  passers-by  upon  the  street  by  means  of  un 
compromising  high  fences.  The  old  houses  of  New  Or 
leans  do  more.  Their  gardens  are  shielded  from  the 
crowded,  noisy,  horrid  streets  by  the  houses  themselves. 
And  he  who  runs  through  those  crowded,  noisy,  horrid 
streets,  must  really  walk,  for  only  so  will  he  catch  brief 
glimpses  of  the  glories  of  those  fading  courtyard 
gardens. 

Sometimes,  if  you  have  the  courage  of  your  convic 
tions  and  the  proper  fashion  of  seizing  opportunity  by 
the  throat  you  may  wander  into  one  of  the  tunnel-like 
gateways  of  one  of  these  very  old  houses.  No  one  will 
halt  you. 

Here  it  is  —  old  France  in  new  America.  The 
tunnel-like  way  from  the  street  is  shady  and  cool.  From 
it  leads  a  stair  to  the  right  and  the  upper  floor  of  the 
house,  a  stair  up  which  a  regiment  might  have  walked, 
and  down  which  the  old  figure  of  a  Balzac  might  descend 
this  moment  without  ever  a  single  jarring  upon  your 
soul.  The  stair  ends  in  a  great  oval  hall,  whose  scarlet 
paper  has  long  since  faded  but  still  remains  a  memory 


244     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

of  the  glories  of  the  days  that  were.  The  carved  en 
tablatures  over  the  doors,  the  bravado  of  cornice  and 
rosette  where  the  plaster  has  not  finally  fallen,  proclaim 
the  former  grandeur  of  this  apartment.  And  in  some 
former  day  a  great  chandelier  must  have  hung  from  the 
center  of  its  graceful  ceiling.  Today  —  some  one  of 
the  neighboring  antique  stores  has  reaped  its  reward, 
and  a  candle  set  in  a  wall-lantern  is  its  sole  illumination. 
A  shabby  room  will  not  bear  the  glories  of  a  gay  chan 
delier.  And  the  old  Frenchman  and  his  wife  who  live 
in  the  place  have  all  but  forgotten.  They  have  a  parrot 
and  a  sewing-machine  and  what  are  the  glories  of  the 
past  to  them? 

Of  course,  such  a  house  must  have  its  courtyard. 
And  if  the  huge  copper-bound  tank  is  dry,  and  the  water 
has  not  forced  its  way  through  the  battered  fountain 
these  many  years,  if  the  old  exquisite  tiles  of  the  house 
long  since  went  to  form  the  roof  of  the  new  garage  of 
some  smart  new  American  place  up  the  river  —  the  mag 
nolia  still  blossoms  magnificently  among  the  decay,  and 
Madame's  skill  with  her  jessamine  and  her  geraniums 
would  confound  the  imported  tricks  of  those  English 
gardeners  in  the  elaborate  new  places. 

Here  then  is  the  old  France  in  the  new  land  —  the 
priceless  treasure  that  New  Orleans  wears  at  her  very 
heart.  And  here  in  the  very  heart  of  that  heart  is  an 
ugly  old  building  boarded  up  by  offensively  brilliant  ad 
vertising  signs. 

An  ugly  old  building  did  we  say,  with  rough  glance 
at  its  rusty  fagades?  Can  one  be  young  and  beautiful 
forever?  Rusty  and  beautiful  —  oh  no,  do  not  scorn 
the  old  St.  Louis  Hotel  for  following  the  most  normal 
of  all  the  laws  of  Nature.  For  within  this  moldering 
and  once  magnificent  tavern  history  was  made.  In  one 
of  its  ancient  rooms  a  President  of  the  United  States 
was  unmade,  while  in  another  chamber  human  life  was 


A  Scene  in  the  Creole  Quarter— New  Orleans 


NEW  ORLEANS  245 

bought  and  sold  with  no  more  concern  than  the  old 
Creole  lady  on  the  far  corner  shows  when  she  sells  you 
the  little  statues  of  the  Blessed  Virgin. 

These  wonders  are  still  to  be  seen  —  for  the  asking. 
The  concierge  of  the  old  hotel  is  a  courteous  lady  who 
with  her  servant  dwells  in  the  two  most  habitable  of  its 
remaining  rooms.  There  is  no  use  knocking  at  the  hotel 
door  for  she  is  very,  very  deaf  indeed,  poor  lady.  But 
if  you  will  brave  a  stern  "  No  Admittance  "  sign  and 
ascend  the  graceful  winding  stair  for  a  single  flight  — 
such  a  stair  as  has  rarely  come  to  our  sight  —  you  will 
find  her  —  ready  and  willing.  One  by  one  she  shows 
you  the  rooms,  faded  and  disreputable,  for  the  hotel  is 
in  a  fearful  state  of  disrepair.  The  plaster  is  falling 
here  and  there,  and  where  it  still  adheres  to  the  lath  the 
old-time  paper  hangs  in  long  shreds,  like  giant  stalac 
tites,  from  the  ceiling.  Once,  for  a  decade  in  the  "  late 
eighties,"  an  effort  was  made  to  revive  the  hotel  and  its 
former  glories  —  a  desperate  and  a  hopeless  effort  — 
and  the  pitiful  "  innovations  "  of  that  regime  still  show. 
But  when  you  close  your  eyes  you  do  not  see  the  St. 
Louis  Hotel  of  that  decade,  but  rather  in  those  won 
derful  twenty  years  before  the  coming  of  the  cruel  war. 
In  those  days  New  Orleans  was  the  gayest  city  in  the 
new  world,  uptilting  its  saucy  nose  at  such  heavy  eastern 
towns  as  New  York  or  Boston.  Its  wharves  were 
crowded  with  the  ships  of  the  world,  the  river-boat  cap 
tains  fought  for  the  opportunity  of  bringing  the  mere 
noses  of  their  craft  against  the  overcrowded  levee. 
Cotton  —  it  was  the  greatest  thing  of  the  world.  New 
Orleans  was  cotton  and  cotton  was  the  king  of  the  world. 

No  wonder  then  that  the  St.  Louis  Hotel  could  say 
when  it  was  new,  that  it  had  the  finest  ballrooms  in  the 
world.  They  still  show  them  to  you,  in  piecemeal,  for 
they  were  long  since  cut  up  into  separate  rooms.  The 
great  rotunda  was  ruined  by  a  temporary  floor  at  the 


246     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

time  the  state  of  Louisiana  bought  the  old  hotel  for  a 
capitol,  and  used  the  rotunda  for  its  fiery  Senate  ses 
sions. 

All  these  things  the  concierge  will  relate  to  you  — 
and  more.  Then  she  takes  you  down  the  old  main- 
stair,  gently  lest  its  rotting  treads  and  risers  should 
crumble  under  too  stout  foot-falls.  Into  the  cavernous 
bottom  of  the  rotunda  she  leads  you.  It  is  encumbered 
with  the  steam-pipes  of  that  after  era,  blocked  with  rub 
bish,  very  dark  withal.  The  concierge,  with  a  fine  sense 
of  the  dramatic,  catches  up  a  bit  of  newspaper,  lights  it, 
thrusts  it  ahead  as  a  lighted  torch. 

;<  The  old  slave  mart,"  she  says,  in  a  well-trained 
stage  whisper,  and  thrusts  the  blazing  paper  up  at  full 
arm's  length.  As  the  torch  goes  higher,  her  voice  goes 
lower :  "  Beyond  the  auction  block,  the  slaves'  prison." 

As  a  matter  of  real  fact,  the  "  slaves'  prison  "  is  prob 
ably  nothing  more  or  less  than  the  negro  quarters  that 
every  oldtime  southern  hotel  used  to  provide  for  the 
slaves  of  its  planter  patrons.  But  the  concierge  does 
not  overlook  dramatic  possibilities.  And  she  is  both  too 
deaf  and  too  much  a  lady  to  be  contradicted.  She  has 
given  you  full  value  for  the  handful  of  pennies  she  ex 
pects  from  you.  And  as  for  you  —  a  feeling  of  some 
thing  like  indignation  wells  within  you  that  the  city  of 
New  Orleans  has  permitted  the  stoutly  built  old  hotel 
to  fall  into  such  ruin.  In  an  era  which  is  doing  much 
to  preserve  the  monuments  of  the  earlier  America,  it 
has  been  overlooked. 

Such  resentment  softens  a  little  further  down.  You 
are  in  Jackson  square  now  —  the  Place  d'Armes  of  the 
old  French  days  —  and  facing  there  the  three  great  lions 
that  have  stood  confronting  that  open  space  since  almost 
the  beginning  of  New  Orleans.  The  great  cathedral 
flanked  by  the  Cabilda  and  the  Presbytery  is  not,  of 
itself,  particularly  beautiful  or  impressive.  But  it  is 


NEW  ORLEANS  247 

interesting  to  remember  that  within  it  on  a  memorable 
occasion  Andrew  Jackson  sat  at  mass  —  interesting  be 
cause  he  had  just  fought  the  battle  of  New  Orleans  and 
ended  the  Second  War  with  England.  And  the  Te 
Deum  that  went  up  at  that  time  was  truly  a  thankful 
one.  The  Cabilda  and  the  Presbytery,  invested  as  they 
are  with  rare  historical  interest,  are  more  worth  while. 

But  to  our  mind  the  chief  delight  of  Jackson  square 
are  the  two  long  red-brick  buildings  that  completely  fill 
the  north  and  south  sides  of  that  delectable  retreat.  In 
themselves  these  old  fellows  are  not  architecturally 
important,  although  by  close  inspection  you  may  find  in 
the  traceries  of  their  gallery  rails  the  initials  of  the 
wife  of  the  Spanish  grandee  —  Madama  de  Pontalba  — 
historically  they  are  not  distinguished,  unless  count  the 
fact  that  in  one  of  them  dwelt  Jenny  Lind  upon  the  occa 
sion  of  a  not-to-be-forgotten  engagement  in  New  Or 
leans —  but  as  the  sides  of  what  is  perhaps  the  most 
delightful  square  in  the  entire  Southland  they  are  most 
satisfying.  Jackson  square  has  fallen  from  its  high 
estate.  Its  gardens  were  once  set  out  in  formal  fashion 
for  the  elect  of  New  Orleans,  nowadays  they  are  visited 
by  swarms  of  the  cheaper  French  and  Italian  lodgers  of 
the  neighborhood,  and  scrawny  felines  from  the  old 
Pontalba  buildings  use  it  as  a  congregating  place.  But, 
even  in  decadent  days,  its  fascination  is  none  the  less. 

Beyond  Jackson  square  rests  the  French  market,  the 
very  index  to  all  that  New  Orleans'  love  of  good  eating 
that  has  become  so  closely  linked  with  the  city.  The 
market-scheme  of  the  city  as  this  is  being  written  is 
being  greatly  revised.  Up  to  the  present  time  the  mar 
ket-men  have  been  autocrats.  The  grocers  of  the  city 
have  been  forbidden  to  sell  fresh  fruits  or  vegetables; 
if  a  retailer  be  audacious  enough  to  wish  to  set  out  with 
a  private  market,  he  must  be  a  certain  considerable 
number  of  squares  distant  from  a  public  institution  — 


248     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

and  pay  to  the  city  a  heavy  license  fee  as  penalty  for 
his  audacity.  Nor  is  that  all.  The  consumer  is  for 
bidden  to  purchase  direct  from  the  producer,  even 
though  the  producer's  wagon  be  backed  up  against  the 
market  curb  in  most  inviting  fashion.  New  Orleans 
recognizes  the  middleman  and  protects  him  —  or  has 
protected  him  until  the  present  time.  Even  peddlers 
have  been  barred  from  hawking  their  wares  through  her 
streets  until  noon  —  when  the  public  markets  close  and 
the  housewives  have  practically  completed  their  pur 
chases  for  the  day. 

But  —  banish  the  thoughts  of  the  markets  as  economic 
problems,  cease  puzzling  your  blessed  brains  with  that 
eternal  problem  of  the  cost-of-living.  Consider  the 
French  market  as  a  truly  delectable  spot.  Go  to  it  early 
in  the  morning,  when  the  sun  is  beginning  to  poke  his 
way  down  into  the  narrow  streets  and  the  shadows  are 
heavy  under  the  galleries.  Breakfast  at  the  hotel? 
Not  a  bit  of  it. 

You  take  your  coffee  and  doughnuts  alongside  the 
market-men  —  at  long  and  immaculate  counters  in  the 
market-house.  And  when  you  are  done  you  will  take 
your  oath  that  you  have  never  before  tasted  coffee. 
The  coffee-man  bends  over  you  —  he  is  a  coffee-man 
descended  from  coffee-men,  for  these  stalls  of  the  fa 
mous  old  markets  are  almost  priceless  heritages  that 
descend  from  generation  to  generation.  In  these  days 
they  never  go  out  of  a  single  family. 

"  Cafe  lait?"  says  the  coffee-man. 

You  nod  assent. 

Two  long-spouted  cans  descend  upon  your  cup.  From 
one  the  coffee,  from  the  other  creamy  milk  come  simul 
taneously,  with  a  skill  that  comes  of  long  years  of  prac 
tice  on  the  part  of  the  coffee-man. 

That  is  all  —  cafe  lait  and  doughnuts.  They  make 
just  as  good  doughnuts  in  Boston,  but  New  England  has 


NEW  ORLEANS  249 

never  known  the  joys  of  cafe  lait.  If  it  had,  it  would 
never  return  to  its  oldtime  coffee  habits.  And  the  older 
markets  of  Boston  do  not  see  the  fine  ladies  of  the  town 
coming  to  them  on  Sunday  morning,  after  mass,  negro 
servants  behind,  to  do  their  marketing,  themselves. 

Hours  of  joy  in  this  market  —  the  food  capital  of  a 
rich  land  of  milk  and  honey.  After  those  .hours  of  joy, 
—  breakfast  at  the  Madame's. 

The  Madame  began  —  no  one  knows  just  how  many 
years  ago  —  by  serving  an  eleven  o'clock  breakfast  to 
the  market-men,  skilled  in  food  as  purveyors  as  most 
critical  of  the  food  they  eat.  The  Madame  realized  that 
problem  —  and  met  it.  So  well  did  she  meet  it  that  the 
fame  of  her  cookery  spread  outside  the  confines  of  the 
market-houses,  and  city  folk  and  tourists  began  drifting 
to  her  table.  In  a  few  years  she  had  established  an  insti 
tution.  And  today  her  breakfast  is  as  much  a  part  of 
New  Orleans  as  the  old  City  Hall  or  the  new  Court 
House. 

She  has  been  dead  several  years  —  dear  old  gas 
tronomic  French  lady  —  but  her  institution,  after  the 
fashion  of  some  institutions,  lives  after  her.  It  still 
stands  at  the  edge  of  the  market  and  it  still  serves  one 
meal  each  day  —  the  traditional  breakfast.  It  is  sad  to 
relate  that  it  has  become  a  little  commercialized  —  they 
sell  souvenir  spoons  and  cook-books  —  but  you  can  shut 
your  eyes  to  these  and  still  see  the  place  in  all  of  its  j 
glories. 

A  long,  low  room  at  the  back  of  and  above  a  little 
saloon,  reached  from  the  side-door  of  the  saloon  by  a 
turning  and  rickety  stair.  A  meagerly  equipped  table 
in  the  long,  low  room,  from  which  a  few  steps  lead  up 
to  a  smoky  but  immensely  clean  kitchen.  From  that 
kitchen  —  odors.  Odors  ?  What  a  name  for  incense, 
the  promise  of  preparation.  You  sometimes  catch 
glimpses  of  busy  women,  fat  and  uncorseted.  Cooks? 


250     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Perish  the  words.     These  are  artists,  if  artists  have  ever 
really  been. 

Finally  —  and  upon  the  stroke  of  eleven  —  the  break 
fast.  It  shall  not  be  described  here  in  intimate  detail 
for  you,  dear  reader,  will  not  be  sitting  at  the  Madame's 
hospitable  table  as  you  read  these  lines.  It  is  enough 
for  you  to  know  that  the  liver  is  unsurpassable  and  the 
coffee  —  the  coffee  gets  its  flavor  from  an  adroit  sweet 
ening  of  cognac  and  of  sugar.  What  matter  the  souvenirs 
now?  The  breakfast  has  lost  none  of  its  savor  through 
the  passing  of  the  years. 

For  here  is  New  Orleans  where  it  seems  impossible 
to  get  a  poor  meal.  There  is  many  and  many  an  interior 
city  of  size  and  pretentious  marbleized  and  flunkeyized 
hotels  of  which  that  may  not  be  said.  But  in  New  Or 
leans  an  appreciation  of  good  cookery  is  an  appreci 
ation  of  the  art  of  a  real  profession.  And  of  her  res 
taurants  there  is  an  infinite  variety  —  La  Louisiane, 
Galatoire's,  Antoine's,  Begue's,  Brasco's  —  the  list  runs 
far  too  long  to  be  printed  here.  Nor  does  the  space  of 
this  page  permit  a  recountal  of  the  dishes  themselves —  : 
the  world- famed  gumbos,  the  crawfish  bisque,  the  red-  V 
snapper  stuffed  with  oysters,  the  crabs  and  the  shrimps. 
And  lest  we  should  be  fairly  suspected  of  trying  to  emu 
late  a  cook-book,  turn  your  back  upon  the  fine  little 
restaurants,  where  noisy  orchestras  and  unspeakable 
cabarets  have  not  yet  dared  to  enter,  and  see  still  a  little 
more  of  the  streets  of  the  old  French  quarter. 

More  courtyards,  more  old  houses,  a  venerable  hall 
now  occupied  by  a  sisterhood  of  the  Roman  church  but 
formerly  gay  with  the  "  quadroon  balls "  which  gave 
spicy  romance  to  all  this  quarter.  And  here,  rising  high 
above  the  narrow  thrust  of  Bourbon  street,  the  French 
Opera,  for  be  it  remembered  that  New  Orleans  had  her 
opera  house  firmly  established  when  New  York  still 
regarded  hers  as  a  dubious  experiment.  To  come  into 


NEW  ORLEANS  251 

the  old  opera  house,  builded  after  the  impressive  fashion 
of  architects  of  another  time,  with  its  real  horseshoe 
and  its  five  great  tiers  rising  within  it  —  is  again  to  see 
the  old  New  Orleans  living  in  the  new.  It  is  to  see  the 
exclusive  Creoles  —  perhaps  the  most  exclusive  folk  in 
all  America  —  half  showing  themselves  in  the  shadowy 
recesses  of  their  boxes.  And  to  be  in  that  venerable 
structure  upon  the  night  of  Mardi  Gras  is  to  stand  upon 
the  threshold  of  a  fairy  world. 

It  is  not  meet  that  the  details  of  the  greatest  annual 
carnival  that  America  has  ever  known  should  be  fully 
described  here.  It  is  enough  here  and  now  to  say  that 
New  Orleans  merely  exists  between  these  great  parties 
at  the  eve  of  each  Lent;  that  nearly  a  twelvemonth  is 
given  to  preparations  for  the  Mardi  Gras.  One  festa 
is  hardly  done  before  plans  are  being  made  for  the  next 
—  rumor  runs  slyly  up  and  down  the  narrow  streets, 
costumiers  are  being  pledged  to  inviolate  secrecy,  strange 
preparatory  sounds  emerge  from  supposedly  abandoned 
sheds  and  houses,  rumors  multiply,  the  air  is  surcharged 
with  secrecy.  Finally  the  night  of  nights.  Canal  street, 
which  every  loyal  resident  of  New  Orleans  believes  to 
be  the  finest  parade  street  in  all  the  world,  is  ablaze  with 
the  incandescence  of  electricity,  a- jam  with  humanity. 
For  a  week  the  trains  have  been  bringing  the  folk  in 
from  half-a-dozen  neighboring  states  by  the  tens  of 
thousands.  There  is  not  a  single  parish  of  venerable 
Louisiana  without  representation;  and  more  than  a  fair 
sprinkling  of  tourists  from  the  North  and  from  over 
seas. 

Finally  —  after  Expectancy  has  almost  given  the  right 
hand  to  Doubt,  the  fanfare  of  trumpets,  the  outriders 
of  Parade.  From  somewhere  has  come  Rex  and  The 
Queen  and  all  the  Great  and  all  the  Hilariously  Funny 
and  the  rest  besides.  From  the  supposedly  abandoned 


252     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

sheds  and  houses,  from  the  costumiers?  Do  not  dare 
to  venture  that,  oh  uncanny  and  worldly  minded  soul ! 
Fairyland  never  emerged  from  old  sheds,  a  King  may 
not  even  dream  of  a  costumier.  From  thin  air,  from 
the  seventh  sense,  the  land  of  the  Mysterious,  this  King 
and  Queen  and  all  their  cavalcade.  Then,  too,  the  Royal 
Palace  — the  historic  French  Opera  House  floored  and 
transformed  for  a  night.  More  lights,  more  color,  the 
culinary  products  of  the  best  chefs  of  all  the  land  work 
ing  under  a  stupendous  energy,  music,  dancing,  white 
shirts,  white  shoulders,  gayety,  beauty  —  for  tomorrow 
is  Ash  Wednesday,  and  Catholic  New  Orleans  takes  its 
Lent  as  seriously  as  it  gaily  takes  the  joyousness  of  its 
carnivals. 

For  three-quarters  of  a  century  these  carnivals  have 
been  the  outspoken  frivols  of  the  old  French  lady  by  the 
bend  of  the  yellow  river.  In  all  that  time  the  carnival 
has  progressed  until  it  today  is  the  outward  expression 
of  the  joyousness  of  a  joyous  city.  In  all  that  time  did 
we  say?  There  was  an  interregnum  —  the  Four  Years. 
In  the  Four  Years  the  little  French  restaurants  were 
closed,  the  lights  at  the  Opera  extinguished  —  there 
could  be  no  Carnival,  for  Tragedy  sat  upon  the  South 
land.  And  in  a  great  house  in  Lafayette  square  there 
sat  a  man  from  Massachusetts  who  ruled  with  more  zeal 
than  kindness.  And  that  man  New  Orleans  has  not 
forgotten  —  not  even  in  the  half-century  that  has  all 
but  healed  the  sores  of  the  Four  Years. 

"  It  is  funny,"  you  begin,  "  that  New  Orleans  should 
make  so  much  of  the  Boston  Club,  when  Butler  came 
from  — •" 

It  is  not  funny.  You  saw  the  Boston  Club  which 
vies  for  social  supremacy  in  the  old  French  city  with 
the  Pickwick  Club,  there  in  Canal  street,  at  least  you 
saw  its  fine  old  white  house  in  that  broad  thoroughfare. 


NEW  ORLEANS  253 

It  is  not  funny.  Your  New  Orleans  man  tells  you  — 
courteously  but  clearly. 

"  We  named  our  club  from  that  game,"  he  says. 

"  Boston  was  a  fine  game,  sir,"  he  adds.  "  And  that 
without  ever  a  thought  of  that  town  up  in  Massachu- 


From  a  carnival  to  a  graveyard  is  a  far  cry  indeed, 
and  yet  the  cemeteries  of  New  Orleans  are  as  distinc 
tive  of  her  as  her  Mardi  Gras  festivities.  We  have 
spoken  of  the  river  and  the  great  part  it  has  played  in 
the  history  of  the  city  that  rests  so  close  to  its  treacher 
ous  shore.  And  it  is  that  very  treacherous  shore  that 
makes  it  so  exceedingly  difficult  to  arrange  a  cemetery 
in  the  soft  and  marshy  soil  on  which  the  city  is  built. 

So  it  is  that  the  New  Orleans'  cemeteries  are  veritable 
cities  of  the  dead.  For  the  bodies  that  are  buried 
within  them  are  placed  above  the  ground,  not  under  them. 
Tombs  and  mausoleums  are  the  rule,  not  the  exception, 
and  where  a  family  is  not  prosperous  enough  to  own  even 
the  simplest  of  tombs,  it  will  probably  join  with  other 
families  or  with  some  association  in  the  ownership  of  a 
house  in  the  city  of  the  dead.  And  for  those  who  have 
not  even  this  opportunity  there  are  the  ovens. 

The  ovens  are  built  in  the  great  walls  that  encompass 
the  older  cemeteries  and  make  them  seem  like  crum 
bling  fortresses.  Four  tiers  high,  each  oven  large  enough 
to  accommodate  a  coffin  —  the  sealed  fronts  bear  the 
epitaphs  of  those  who  have  known  the  New  Orleans  of 
other  days.  A  motley  company  they  are  —  poets, 
pirates,  judges,  planters,  soldiers,  priests  —  around  them 
the  scarred  regiments  of  those  who  lived  their  lives  with 
out  the  haunting  touch  of  Fame  upon  the  shoulder  —  no 
one  will  even  venture  a  guess  as  to  the  number  that  have 
been  laid  away  within  a  single  one  of  these  cities. 

And  when  you  are  done  with  seeing  the  graves  of 


254     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Jean  Lafitte  or  Dominique  You  —  why  is  it  that  the 
average  mind  pricks  up  with  a  more  quickened  interest 
at  the  tomb  of  a  pirate  than  at  a  preacher  —  the  Por 
tuguese  sexton  begins  plucking  at  the  loosely  laid  bricks 
of  one  of  these  abandoned  ovens.  Abandoned?  He 
lifts  out  a  skull,  this  twentieth  century  Yorick  and  bids 
you  peep  through  the  aperture.  Like  the  concierge  of 
the  old  hotel,  looking  is  made  more  easy  from  a  blazing 
folding  copy  of  the  morning  Picayune.  In  the  place 
are  seemingly  countless  skulls,  with  lesser  bones. 

"He  had  good  teeth,  this  fellow,"  coughs  the  Por 
tuguese. 

You  do  not  answer.     Finally  — 
"•Do  they  bury  all  of  them  this  way?" 
Not  at  first,  you  find.     The  strict  burial  laws  of  New 
Orleans  demand  that  the  body  shall  be  carefully  sealed 
and  kept  within  the  oven  for  at  least  a  year.     After  that 
the  sexton  may  open  the  place,  burn  the  coffin  and  thrust 
the  bones  into  the  rear  of  the  place.     And  New  Orleans 
can  see  nothing  unusual  in  the  custom. 

"  New  Orleans  is  more  like  the  old  San  Francisco 
than  any  other  community  I  have  ever  seen,"  says  the 
Calif ornian.  Not  in  any  architectural  sense  and  of 
course  two  cities  could  hardly  be  further  apart  in  loca 
tion  than  the  city  in  the  flat  marshlands  whose  trees  are 
below  the  level  of  the  yellow  river  at  flood-tide,  and  the 
new  city  that  rises  on  mountainous  slopes  from  the 
clear  waters  of  the  Golden  Gate.  But  there  is  an  in 
tangible  likeness  about  New  Orleans  and  his  city  that 
was  but  never  again  can  be,  that  strikes  to  the  soul  of 
the  Calif  ornian.  Perhaps  he  has  come  to  know  some 
thing  of  the  real  life  of  the  Creoles  —  of  those  strange 
folk  who  even  today  can  say  that  they  have  lived  long 
lives  in  New  Orleans  and  never  gone  south  of  Canal 
street.  Perhaps  he  has  met  some  of  that  little  company 


NEW  ORLEANS  255 

of  old  French  gentlemen  who  keep  their  faded  black 
suits  in  as  trim  condition  as  their  own  good  manners, 
and  who  scrimp  and  save  through  years  and  months 
that  they  may  visit  —  not  Chicago  or  New  York  —  but 
Paris,  Paris  the  unutterable  and  the  unforgettable. 

"  New  Orleans  is  more  like  the  old  San  Francisco 
than  any  other  community  that  I  have  ever  seen,"  re 
iterates  the  Californian.  "  It  is  more  like  the  old  than 
the  new  San  Francisco  can  ever  become." 

And  there  is  a  moral  in  that  which  the  San  Franciscan 
speaks.  In  the  twinkling  of  an  eye  the  old  San  Fran 
cisco  disappeared  —  forever.  Slowly,  but  surely,  the 
old  New  Orleans  is  beginning  to  fade  away.  There 
are  indubitable  signs  of  this  already.  When  it  shall 
have  gone,  our  last  stronghold  of  old  French  customs 
and  manners  shall  have  gone.  One  of  the  most  fasci 
nating  chapters  in  the  story  of  our  Southland  will  have 
been  closed. 


i6 
THE  CITY  OF  THE  LITTLE  SQUARES 

IN  after  years,  you  will  like  to  think  of  it  as  the  City 
of  the  Little  Squares.  After  all  the  other  memories 
of  San  Antonio  are  gone  —  the  narrow  streets  twisting 
and  turning  their  tortuous  ways  through  the  very  heart 
of  the  old  town,  the  missions  strung  out  along  the  Con- 
cepcion  road  like  faded  and  broken  bits  of  bric-a-brac, 
the  brave  and  militant  show  of  arsenal  and  fort  —  then 
shall  the  fragrance  of  those  open  plazas  long  remain. 
The  Military  Plaza,  with  its  great  bulk  of  a  City  Hall 
facing  it,  the  Main  Plaza,  where  the  grave  towers  of 
the  little  cathedral  look  down  upon  the  palm-trees  and 
the  beggars,  the  newer,  open  squares  —  always  plazas 
in  San  Antonio  —  and  then,  best  of  all,  the  Alamo  Plaza, 
with  that  squat  namesake  structure  facing  it  —  the  lion 
of  a  town  of  many  lions.  These  open  places  are  the 
distinctive  features  of  the  oldest  and  the  best  of  the 
Texas  towns.  They  lend  to  it  the  Latin  air  that  renders 
it  different  from  most  other  cities  in  America.  They 
help  to  make  San  Antonio  seem  far  more  like  Europe 
than  America. 

To  this  old  town  come  the  Texans,  always  in  great 
numbers  for  it  is  their  great  magnet  —  the  focusing 
point  that  has  drawn  them  and  before  them,  their  fathers, 
their  grandfathers  and  their  great-grandfathers  —  far 
reaching  generations  of  Texans  who  have  gone  before. 
For  here  is  the  distinct  play-ground  of  the  Lone  Star 
State.  Its  other  cities  are  attractive  enough  in  their 
several  ways,  but  at  the  best  their  fame  is  distinctly  com- 

256 


SAN  ANTONIO  257 

mercial  —  Fort  Worth  as  a  packing-house  town,  Dallas 
as  a  distributing  point  for  great  wholesale  enterprises, 
Houston  as  a  banking  center,  Galveston  as  the  great 
water-gate  of  Texas  and  the  second  greatest  ocean  port 
of  the  whole  land.  San  Antonio  is  none  of  these  things. 
While  the  last  census  showed  her  to  be  the  largest  of  all 
Texas  cities  in  point  of  population,  it  is  said  by  her  jeal 
ous  rivals  and  it  probably  is  true,  that  nearly  half  of  that 
population  is  composed  of  Mexicans ;  and  here  is  a 
part  of  our  blessed  land  where  the  Mexican,  like  his 
dollar,  must  be  accepted  at  far  less  than  his  nominal 
value. 

But  if  it  were  not  for  these  Mexicans  —  that  delicate 
strain  of  the  fine  old  Spanish  blood  that  still  runs  in 
her  veins  —  San  Antonio  would  have  lost  much  of  her 
naive  charm  many  years  ago.  The  touch  of  the  old 
grandees  is  everywhere  laid  upon  the  city.  In  the 
narrow  streets,  the  architecture  of  the  solid  stone 
structures  that  crowd  in  upon  them  in  a  tremen 
dously  neighborly  fashion  shows  the  touch  of  the 
Spaniard  in  every  corner;  it  appears  again  and 
again  —  in  the  iron  traceries  of  some  high-sprung  fence 
or  second-story  balcony  rail,  or  perhaps  in  the  linea 
ments  of  some  snug  little  church,  half  hidden  in  a  quiet 
place.  The  Cathedral  of  San  Fernando,  standing  there 
in  the  Main  Plaza,  looks  as  if  it  might  have  been  stolen 
from  the  old  city  of  Mexico  and  moved  bodily  north 
without  ever  having  even  disturbed  its  fortress-like 
walls  or  the  crude  frescoes  of  its  sanctuary.  The  four 
missions  out  along  the  Concepcion  road  are  direct  fruit 
of  Spanish  days  —  and  remember  that  each  of  the  little 
squares  of  San  Antonio  is  a  plaza,  so  dear  to  the  heart 
of  a  Latin  when  he  comes  to  build  a  real  city. 

But  the  impress  of  those  troublous  years  when  Spain, 
far-seeing  and  in  her  golden  age,  was  dreaming  of 
Texas  as  a  mighty  principality,  is  not  alone  in  the 


258     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

wood  and  the  stone  of  San  Antonio,  not  even  in  the  delir 
ious  riot  of  narrow  streets  and  little  squares.  The  im 
press  of  a  Latin  nation  still  not  three  hundred  miles 
distant,  is  in  the  bronzed  faces  of  the  Mexicans  who 
fill  her  streets  Some  of  them  are  the  old  men  who  sit 
emotionless  hours  in  the  hot  sun  in  the  narrow  highways, 
and  vend  their  unspeakable  sweets,  or  who  come  to  af 
fluence  perhaps  and  maintain  the  marketing  of  tamales 
and  chile  con  carne  at  one  of  the  many  little  outdoor 
stands  that  line  the  business  streets  of  San  Antonio, 
and  make  it  possible  for  a  stranger  to  eat  a  full-course 
dinner,  if  he  will,  without  passing  indoors.  These  are 
the  Mexicans  of  San  Antonio  who  are  most  in  evidence 
—  the  men  still  affecting  in  careless  grandeur  their 
steeple-crowned,  broad-brimmed  hats,  even  if  the  rest 
of  their  clothing  remain  in  the  docile  humility  of  blue 
jeans;  the  women  scorning  such  humility  and  running  to 
the  brilliancy  of  red  and  yellow  velvets,  although  of  late 
years  the  glories  of  the  American-made  hat  have  begun 
to  tell  sadly  upon  the  preeminence  of  the  mantilla. 
These  are  the  Mexicans  who  dominate  the  streets  of 
the  older  part  of  the  town  —  they  are  something  more 
than  dominant  factors  in  the  West  end  of  the  city,  long 
ago  known  as  the  Chihuahua  quarter. 

But  there  is  another  sort  —  less  often  seen  upon  the 
streets  of  San  Antonio.  This  sort  is  the  Mexican  of 
class,  who  has  come  within  recent  years  in  increasing 
numbers  to  dwell  in  a  city  where  unassuming  soldiery 
afford  more  real  protection  for  him  and  for  his  than 
do  all  of  the  brilliantly  uniformed  regiments  with  which 
Diaz  once  illuminated  his  gay  capital.  Since  our  neigh 
bor  to  the  south  entered  fully  upon  its  troublous  season 
these  refugees  have  multiplied.  You  could  see  for 
yourself  any  time  within  the  past  two  years  sleeping 
cars  come  up  from  Laredo  filled  with  nervous  women 
and  puzzled  children.  These  were  the  families  of  pros- 


SAN  ANTONIO  259 

perous  citizens  from  the  south  of  Mexico,  who  in  their 
hearts  showed  no  contempt  for  the  comfortable  protec 
tion  of  the  American  flag. 

A  man  plucks  you  by  the  sleeve  as  you  are  passing 
through  the  corridors  of  one  of  the  great  modern  hotels 
of  San  Antonio,  hotels  which,  by  the  way,  have  been 
builded  with  the  profits  of  the  cattle-trade  in  Texas. 

"  That  hombre,"  he  says,  "  he  is  the  uncle  of  Madero." 

But  a  mere  uncle  of  the  former  Mexican  President 
hardly  counts  in  a  town  which  has  the  reputation  of 
fairly  breeding  revolutions  for  the  sister  land  to  the 
south ;  whose  streets  seem  to  whisper  of  rumors  and 
counter-rumors,  the  vague  details  of  plot  and  counter 
plot.  There  is  a  whole  street  down  in  the  southwestern 
corner  of  San  Antonio  lined  with  neat  white  houses,  and 
the  town  will  know  it  for  many  years  as  "  Revolutionary 
Row."  For  in  the  first  of  these  houses  General  Ber 
nardo  Reyes  lived,  and  in  the  second  of  them  this  former 
governor  of  Nuevo  Leon  planned  his  coup  d'etat  by 
which  he  was  to  march  into  Mexico  City  with  all  the 
glory  of  the  Latin,  bands  playing,  flags  flying,  a  display 
of  showy  regimentals.  Reyes  had  read  English  history, 
and  he  remembered  that  one  Prince  Charlie  had  at 
tempted  something  of  the  very  sort.  In  the  long  run 
the  difference  was  merely  that  Prince  Charlie  succeeded 
while  Reyes  landed  in  a  dirty  prison  in  Mexico  City. 

Here  then  is  the  very  incubator  of  Mexican  revolu 
tion.  There  is  not  an  hour  in  San  Antonio  when  the 
secret  agents  of  the  United  States  and  all  the  govern 
ments  and  near-governments  of  our  southern  neighbor 
are  not  fairly  swarming  in  the  town  and  alive  to  their 
responsibilities.  The  border  is  again  passing  through 
historic  days  —  and  it  fully  realizes  that.  It  is  twenty- 
four  hours  of  steady  riding  from  San  Antonio  over  to 
El  Paso  —  the  queer  little  city  under  the  shadows 


2<5o     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

of  the  mountains  and  perched  hard  against  the  "  silver 
Rio  Grande,"  this  last  often  so  indistinguishable  that  a 
young  American  lieutenant  marched  his  men  right  over 
and  into  Mexican  soil  one  day  without  knowing  the  dif 
ference —  until  he  was  confronted  by  the  angry  citizens 
of  Ciudad  Juarez  and  an  affaire  nationale  almost  created. 
Every  mile  of  that  tedious  trip  trouble  is  in  the  air. 

And  yet  El  Paso  does  not  often  take  the  situation  very 
seriously.  It  is  almost  an  old  story,  and  if  the  revolu 
tionists  will  only  be  kind  enough  to  point  their  guns 
away  from  the  U.  S.  A.  they  can  blaze  away  as  long  as 
they  like  and  the  ammunition  lasts.  In  fact  El  Paso 
feels  that  as  long  as  the  Mexican  frontier  battles  have 
proper  stage  management  they  are  first-rate  advertising 
attractions  for  the  town  —  quite  discounting  mere  Mardi 
Gras  or  Portola  or  flower  celebrations,  Frontier  or 
Round-up  Days,  as  well  as  its  own  simpler  joys  of 
horse-racing  and  bull-fighting.  On  battle-days  El  Paso 
can  ascend  to  its  house-tops  and  get  a  rare  thrill.  But 
when  the  atrocious  marksmanship  of  ill-trained  Mexi 
cans  does  its  worst,  and  a  few  stray  bullets  go  whistling 
straight  across  upon  American  soil,  El  Paso  grows 
angry.  It  demands  of  Washington  if  it  realizes  that 
the  U.  S.  A.  is  being  bombarded  —  the  fun  of  fighting 
dies  out  in  a  moment. 

San  Antonio  is  a  safer  breeding  ground  for  insur 
rection  than  is  El  Paso.  For  one  thing  it  is  out  of  care 
less  rifle-shot,  and  for  another  —  well  at  El  Paso  some 
Mexican  troopers  might  come  right  across  the  silver 
Rio  Grande  in  a  dry  season,  never  wetting  their  feet  or 
dreaming  that  they  were  crossing  the  majestic  river 
boundary,  and  pick  up  a  few  erring  citizens  without 
much  effort.  There  is  a  risk  at  El  Paso  that  is  not 
present  in  San  Antonio.  Hence  the  bigger  town  —  in 
its  very  atmosphere  emitting  a  friendly  comfort  toward 
plottings  and  plannings  —  is  chosen. 


SAN  ANTONIO  261 

You  wish  to  come  closer  to  the  inner  heart  of  the 
town.  Very  well  then,  your  guide  leads  you  to  the  In 
ternational  Club  which  perches  between  the  narrow  and 
important  thoroughfare  of  Commerce  street  and  one  of 
the  interminable  windings  of  the  gentle  San  Antonio 
river.  It  was  on  the  roof  of  the  International  Club  that 
Secretary  Root  was  once  given  a  famous  dinner.  It  is 
an  institution  frankly  given  "  to  the  encouragement  of 
a  friendly  feeling  between  Mexico  and  the  United 
States."  It  is  something  more  than  that,  however.  It 
is  a  refuge  and  sort  of  harbor  for  storm-tossed  hearts 
and  weary  minds  that  perforce  must  do  their  thinking 
in  a  tongue  that,  to  us,  is  alien.  Most  of  the  time  the 
newspaper  men  of  the  town  sit  in  the  rear  room  of  the 
club  and  look  down  across  the  tiny  river  on  to  the  quiet 
grounds  of  an  oldtime  monastery.  They  play  their  pool 
and  dominoes  —  two  arts  that  seem  hopelessly  wedded 
throughout  all  Texas.  The  International  Club  nods. 

Suddenly  a  tall  bronzed  man,  with  mustachios,  per 
haps  a  little  group  of  Mexicans  will  come  into  the  place. 
The  pool  and  the  dominoes  stop  short.  There  are 
whisperings,  flashy  papers  from  Mexico  city  are  sud 
denly  produced,  maps  are  studied.  One  man  has  "  in 
side  information  "  from  Washington,  another  lays  claim 
to  mysterious  knowledge  up  from  the  President's  palace 
of  the  southern  capital,  perhaps  from  the  constitutional 
ists  along  the  frontier.  There  is  a  great  deal  of  talk, 
much  mystery  —  after  all,  not  much  real  information. 

But  when  some  real  situation  does  develop,  San  An 
tonio  has  glorious  little  thrills.  To  be  the  incubator  of 
revolution  is  almost  as  exciting  as  to  have  bull-fights 
or  a  suburban  battle-field,  the  treasures  for  which  San 
Antonio  cannot  easily  forgive  her  rival,  El  Paso.  Each 
new  plot-hatching  of  this  sort  gives  the  big  Texas  town 
fresh  thrills.  Gossip  is  revived  in  the  hotel  lobbies  and 
restaurants,  the  cool  and  lofty  rooms  of  the  Interna- 


262     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

tional  Club  are  filled  with  whisperers  in  an  alien  tongue, 
out  at  Fort  Sam  Houston  the  cavalrymen  rise  in  their 
stirrups  at  the  prospect  of  some  real  excitement.  San 
Antonio  does  not  want  war  —  of  course  not  —  but  if  it 
must  have  war  —  well  it  is  already  prepared  for  the 
shock.  And  it  talks  of  little  else. 

"  Within  ten  years  the  United  States  will  have  an 
nexed  Mexico  and  San  Antonio  will  have  become  a 
second  Chicago,"  says  one  citizen  in  his  enthusiasm. 
"  And  what  a  Chicago  —  railroads,  manufactories  and 
the  best  climate  of  any  great  city  in  the  world." 

Even  in  war-times  your  true  San  Antonian  cannot 
forget  one  of  the  chief  assets  of  his  lovely  town. 

The  others  say  little.  One  is  a  junior  officer  from  out 
at  the  post.  He  can  say  nothing.  But  he  is  hoping. 
There  is  not  much  for  an  army  man  in  inaction  and  the 
best  of  drills  are  not  like  the  real  thing.  For  him 
again  —  the  old  slogan  —  "a  fight  or  a  frolic." 

Not  all  of  San  Antonio  is  Spanish  —  although  very 
little  of  it  is  negro.  An  astonishing  proportion  of  its 
population  is  of  German  descent.  These  are  largely 
gathered  in  the  east  end  of  the  town,  that  which  was  for 
merly  called  the  Alamo  quarter,  and  like  all  Germans 
they  like  their  beer.  The  brewing  industry  is  one  of 
the  great  businesses  of  San  Antonio  —  and  the  most 
famous  of  all  these  breweries  is  the  smallest  of  them. 
On  our  first  trip  to  "  San  Antone  "  we  heard  about  that 
beer ;  all  the  way  down  through  Texas  — "  the  most  won 
derful  brew  in  the  entire  land." 

The  active  force  of  this  particular  Los  Angeles  brew 
ery  consisted  of  but  one  man,  the  old  German  who 
carried  his  recipe  with  him  in  the  top  of  his  head, 
and  who  had  carefully  kept  it  there  throughout  the 
years.  In  the  cellar  of  the  little  brewery  he  made 
the  beer,  upstairs  and  in  the  garden  he  served  it. 


SAN  ANTONIO  263 

In  the  mornings  he  worked  at  his  cellar  kettles,  in  the 
late  afternoon  and  the  early  evening  he  stood  behind 
his  bar  awaiting  his  patrons.  If  they  wished  to  sit  out 
in  the  shady  garden  they  must  serve  themselves.  There 
were  no  waiters  in  the  place.  If  a  man  could  not  walk 
straight  up  to  the  bar  and  get  his  beer  he  was  in  no 
condition  for  it.  The  old  German  was  as  proud  of  the 
respectability  of  his  place  as  he  was  of  the  secret  recipe 
for  the  beer,  which  had  been  handed  down  in  his  family 
from  generation  to  generation. 

Only  once  was  that  secret  given  —  and  then  after 
much  tribulation  and  in  great  confidence  to  an  agent  of 
the  government.  But  he  had  his  reward.  For  the 
government  at  Washington  in  its  turn  pronounced  his 
the  purest  beer  in  all  the  land.  Men  then  came  to  him 
with  proposals  that  he  place  it  upon  the  market.  They 
talked  to  him  in  a  tempting  way  about  the  profits  in  the 
business,  but  he  shook  his  head.  His  beer  was  never  to 
be  taken  from  the  brewery.  It  was  a  rule  from  which 
San  Antonians  and  tourists  alike  had  tried  to  swerve 
him,  to  no  purpose.  Of  course,  every  rule  has  its  ex 
ceptions  but  there  was  only  a  single  exception  to  this. 
Each  Saturday  night  Mr.  Degen  used  to  send  a  small 
keg  over  with  his  compliments  to  a  boyhood  friend  — 
he  believed  that  friendship  of  a  certain  sort  can  break 
all  rules  and  precedents. 

All  the  way  down  through  dry  Texas  we  smacked  our 
lips  at  the  thought  of  Degen's  beer.  Before  we  had 
been  in  San  Antonio  a  dozen  hours  we  found  our  way 
to  the  brewery;  in  a  quiet  side  street  down  back  of  the 
historic  Alamo.  But  we  had  no  beer. 

The  brewer  was  dead.  In  a  neighboring  street  his 
friends  were  quietly  gathering  for  his  funeral,  and  ru 
mor  was  rife  as  to  whether  or  no  he  had  confided  his 
recipe  to  his  sons.  It  was  a  great  funeral,  according  to 
the  local  newspapers,  the  greatest  in  the  recent  history 


264    PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

of  San  Antonio.  It  was  a  tribute  from  the  chief  citizens 
of  a  town  to  a  simple  man  who  had  lived  his  life  simply 
and  honestly  —  who  in  his  quiet  way  had  builded  up  one 
of  the  most  distinctive  institutions  of  the  place. 

Rumor  was  soon  satisfied.  The  secret  of  the  recipe 
of  the  beer  had  not  died.  In  a  few  days  the  brisk  little 
brewery  in  the  side  street  was  in  action  once  again. 
The  sitout  Germans  in  their  shirt-sleeves  were  again 
tramping  with  their  paddles  round  and  round  the  great 
vat  while  their  foaming  product  was  being  handed  to 
patrons  in  the  adjoining  room.  But,  alas,  the  traditions 
of  the  founder  are  gone.  The  beer  is  now  bottled  and 
sold  on  the  market  —  in  a  little  while  is  will  be  embla 
zoned  in  electric  lights  along  the  main  streets  of  New 
York  and  Chicago.  We  are  in  a  commercial  and  a  ma 
terial  age.  Even  in  San  Antonio  they  are  threatening 
to  widen  Commerce  street  —  that  narrow  but  immensely 
distinctive  thoroughfare  that  cuts  through  the  heart  of 
the  town  —  threatening,  also,  to  tear  down  the  old  con 
vent  walls  next  the  Alamo  and  there  erect  a  modern 
park  and  monument.  By  the  time  these  things  are  done 
and  San  Antonio  is  thoroughly  "  modernized  "  she  will 
be  ready  for  an  awakening  —  she  is  apt  to  find  with 
her  na'ive  charm  gone  the  golden  flood  of  tourists  has 
ceased  to  stop  within  her  walls.  Truly  she  will  have 
killed  the  goose  that  laid  the  golden  egg. 

You  will  like  to  think  of  it  as  the  City  of  the  Little 
Squares.  After  all  the  other  memories  of  San  Antonio 
are  gone  you  will  revert  to  these  —  gay  open  places, 
filled  with  palms  and  other  tropical  growths,  and  flanked 
by  the  crumbling  architecture  of  yesterday  elbowing  the 
newer  constructions  of  today.  You  will  like  to  think 
of  those  squares  in  the  sunny  daytime  with  the  deep 
shadows  running  aslant  across  the  faces,  there  is  de 
light  in  the  memory  of  them  at  eventide,  when  the  clus- 


SAN  ANTONIO  265 

ter  lights  burn  brightly  and  the  narrow  sidewalks  are 
filled  with  gaily  dressed  crowds,  typical  Mexicans,  tall 
Texans  down  from  the  ranches  for  a  really  good  time 
in  "  old  San  Antone,"  natives  of  the  cosmopolitan  town, 
tourists  of  every  sort  and  description.  Then  comes  the 
hour  when  the  crowds  are  gone,  the  town  asleep,  its 
noisy  clocks  speaking  midnight  hours  to  mere  empti 
ness  —  San  Antonio  breathes  heavily,  dreams  of  the  days 
when  she  was  a  Spanish  town  of  no  slight  importance, 
and  then  looks  forward  to  the  morrow.  She  believes  that 
her  golden  age  is  not  yet  come.  Her  plans  for  the  fu 
ture  are  ambitious,  her  opportunity  is  yet  to  come.  In 
so  far  as  those  dreams  involve  the  passing  of  the  old 
in  San  Antonio  and  the  coming  of  the  new,  God  grant 
that  they  will  never  come  true. 


17 

THE  AMERICAN  PARIS 

A  GREAT  bronze  arch  spans  Seventeenth  street  and 
bids  you  welcome  to  Denver.  For  the  capital  of 
Colorado  seems  only  second  to  the  Federal  capital  as 
a  mecca  for  American  tourists.  She  has  advertised  her 
charms,  her  climate,  her  super-marvelous  scenery  clev 
erly  and  generously.  The  response  must  be  all  that  she 
could  possibly  wish.  All  summer  and  late  into  the  au 
tumn  her  long  stone  station  is  crowded  with  travelers 
—  she  is  the  focal  point  of  those  who  come  to  Colorado 
and  who  find  it  the  ideal  summer  playground  of  Amer 
ica. 

To  that  great  section  known  as  the  Middle  West,  be 
ginning  at  an  imaginary  line  drawn  from  Chicago  south 
through  St.  Louis  and  so  to  the  Gulf,  there  is  hardly  a 
resort  that  can  even  rival  Colorado  in  popular  favor. 
Take  Kansas,  for  a  single  instance.  Kansas  comes 
scurrying  up  into  the  Colorado  mountains  every  blessed 
summer.  It  grows  fretfully  hot  down  in  the  Missouri 
bottoms  by  the  latter  part  of  July,  and  the  Kansans  be 
gin  to  take  advantage  of  the  low  rates  up  to  Denver 
and  Colorado  Springs  and  Pueblo.  And  with  the  Kan 
sans  come  a  pretty  good  smattering  of  the  folk  of  the 
rest  of  the  Middle  West.  They  crowd  the  trains  out 
of  Omaha  and  Kansas  City  night  after  night;  at  dawn 
they  come  trooping  out  through  the  portal  of  the  Denver 
Union  station  and  pass  underneath  that  bronze  arch  of 
welcome. 

They  find  a  clean  and  altogether  fascinating  city 

266 


DENVER  267 

awaiting  them,  a  city  solidly  and  substantially  built. 
Eighteen  years  ago  Denver  decided  that  she  must  dis 
continue  the  use  of  wooden  buildings  within  her  limits. 
She  came  to  an  expensive  and  full  realization  of  that. 
For  Colorado  is  an  arid  country  nominally,  and  water 
is  a  precious  commodity  within  her  boundaries.  The 
irrigation  ditches  are  familiar  parts  of  the  landscapes 
and  ever  present  needs  of  her  cities.  To  put  out  fire 
takes  water,  and  Denver  sensibly  begins  her  water  econ 
omy  by  demanding  that  every  structure  that  is  within 
her  be  built  of  brick  or  stone  or  concrete.  And  yet  her 
parks  are  a  constant  reproach  to  towns  within  the  re 
gions  of  bountiful  water.  They  are  wonderfully  green, 
belying  that  arid  country,  and  the  water  that  goes  to 
make  them  green  comes  from  the  fastnesses  of  the  won 
derful  Rockies,  a  full  hundred  miles  away. 

The  brick  buildings  make  for  a  substantial  city,  but 
Denver  herself  has  a  solidity  that  you  do  not  often  see 
in  a  Western  city.  Giant  office  buildings  in  her  chief 
streets  do  not  often  shoulder  against  ill-kempt  open  lots, 
have  as  unbidden  neighbors  mere  shanties  or  hovels. 
Moreover,  she  is  not  a  "  one-street  town."  Sixteenth 
and  Seventeenth  streets  vie  for  supremacy  —  the  one 
with  the  great  retail  establishments,  the  other  with  the 
hotels,  banks  and  railroad  offices.  There  are  other 
streets  of  business  importance  —  no  one  street  not  even 
as  a  via  sacre  of  this  bustling  town  for  the  best  of  her 
homes. 

The  Paris  of  America,  is  what  she  likes  to  call  herself 
and  when  you  come  to  know  her,  the  comparison  is  not 
bad.  But  Paris,  with  all  of  her  charms,  has  not  the  lo 
cation  of  Denver  —  upon  the  crest  of  a  rolling,  treeless 
plain,  with  the  Rocky  Mountains,  jagged  and  snow 
capped,  to  serve  as  a  garden-wall.  Belasco  might  have 
staged  Denver  —  and  then  been  proud  of  his  work. 


268     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

But  hers  is  a  solitary  grandeur  and  a  very  great  isola 
tion.  She  is  isolated  agriculturally  and  industrially,  and 
before  long  we  shall  see  how  difficult  all  this  makes  it 
for  her  commercial  interests.  It  makes  things  difficult 
in  her  social  life,  and  Denver  must,  and  does,  have  a 
keen  social  life. 

The  isolation  and  the  altitude,  constantly  tending  to 
make  humans  nervous  and  unstrung,  demands  amuse 
ment,  self-created  amusement  of  necessity.  If  Denver 
is  not  amused  she  quarrels;  you  can  see  that  in  her  un 
settled  and  troubled  politics,  and  her  endless  battles  with 
the  railroads.  So  she  is  wiser  when  she  laughs  and  it 
is  that  faculty  of  much  laughing,  much  fun,  expressed 
in  a  variety  of  amusements  that  have  led  magazine 
writers  to  call  the  town,  the  Paris  of  America,  although 
there  is  little  about  her,  save  the  broad  streets  and  her 
many  open  squares  and  parks  to  suggest  the  real  Paris. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  Seine  is  hardly  to  be  com 
pared  to  the  majesty  of  the  backbone  of  the  continent, 
Denver's  greatest  glory. 

In  winter  Denver  society  has  a  fixed  program.  On 
Monday  night  it  religiously  attends  the  Broadway  Thea 
ter,  a  playhouse  which  on  at  least  one  night  of  the  week 
blossoms  out  as  gayly  as  the  Metropolitan  Opera  House. 
Denver  assumes  to  prove  herself  the  Paris  of  America 
by  the  gayness  of  its  gowns  and  its  hats  and  a  Denver  res 
taurant  on  Monday  night  after  the  play  only  seems  like 
a  bit  of  upper  Broadway,  Manhattan,  transplanted.  On 
Tuesday  afternoon  society  attends  the  vaudeville  at  the 
Orpheum  and  perhaps  the  Auditorium  or  one  of  the  lesser 
theaters  that  night.  By  Wednesday  evening  at  the  latest 
the  somewhat  meager  theater  possibilities  of  the  place 
are  exhausted  and  one  wealthy  man  from  New  York 
who  went  out  there  used  to  go  to  bed  on  Wednesday 
until  Monday,  when  the  dramatic  program  began  anew. 


DENVER  269 

For  him  it  was  either  bed  or  the  "  movies,"  and  he 
seemed  to  prefer  bed. 

In  summer  the  Broadway  is  closed,  and  Elitch's  Gar 
dens,  one  of  the  distinctive  features  of  the  town,  takes 
its  place  as  a  Monday  rendezvous.  It  is  a  gay  place, 
Elitch's,  with  a  quaint  foreign  touch.  A  cozy  theater 
stands  in  the  middle  of  an  apple  orchard  —  part  of  the 
one-time  farm  of  the  proprietress'  father.  Good  taste 
and  the  delicate  skill  of  architect  and  landscape  gardener 
have  gone  hand  in  hand  for  its  charm.  You  go  out  there 
and  dine  leisurely,  and  then  you  cross  the  long  shady 
paths  under  the  apples  to  the  theater.  And  even  if  the 
play  in  that  tiny  playhouse  were  not  all  that  might  be 
expected  —  although  the  best  of  actors  play  upon  its 
stage  —  one  would  be  in  a  broadly  generous  mood,  at 
having  dined  and  spent  the  evening  in  so  completely 
charming  a  spot. 

But  the  Parisians  of  Colorado  are  not  blind  to  the 
summer  joys  of  the  wonderful  country  that  lies  around- 
about  them.  They  quickly  become  mountaineers,  in  the 
full  sense  of  the  word.  They  can  ride  —  and  read  rid 
ing  not  as  merely  cantering  in  the  park  but  as  sitting  all 
day  in  the  saddle  of  some  cranky  broncho  —  they  can 
build  fires,  cook  and  live  in  the  open.  A  Denver  so 
ciety  woman  is  as  particular  about  her  khakias  as  about 
her  evening  frocks.  When  these  folk,  experienced  and 
well-schooled,  go  off  up  into  the  great  hills,  they  are  the 
envy  of  all  the  tourists. 

Do  not  forget  that  we  started  by  showing  Denver  as 
a  mecca  for  these  folk.  When  you  come  to  see  how 
very  well  the  Paris  of  America  takes  care  of  them  you 
do  not  wonder  that  they  return  to  her  —  many  times; 
that  they  are  with  her  more  or  less  the  entire  year  round. 
Her  hotels  are  big  and  they  are  exceedingly  well  run. 
There  are  more  side  trips  than  a  tourist  can  take,  us- 


270     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

ing  the  city  as  a  base  of  operations,  than  a  man  might 
physically  use  in  a  month.  The  most  of  these  run  off 
into  the  mountains  that  have  been  standing  sentinel  over 
Denver  since  first  she  was  born.  In  a  day  you  can  leave 
the  bustling  capital  town,  pass  the  foothills  of  the  Rock 
ies  and  climb  fourteen  thousand  feet  aloft  to  the 
very  backbone  of  the  continent.  Indeed,  it  seems  to  be 
the  very  roof  of  the  world  when  you  stand  on  a  sentinel 
peak  and  look  upon  timber  line  two  thousand  feet  below, 
where  the  trees  in  another  of  Nature's  great  tragedies 
finally  cease  their  vain  attempts  to  climb  the  mountain 
tops. 

A  man  recommended  one  of  the  mountain  trips  over 
a  wonderfully  constructed  railroad,  poetically  called  the 
"  Switzerland  Trail." 

"  You'll  like  that  trip,"  he  said,  with  the  enthusiasm 
of  the  real  Denverite.  "  It's  wonderful,  and  such  a  rail 
road!  Why,  there  are  thirty-two  tunnels  between  here 
and  the  divide." 

The  tourist  to  whom  this  suggestion  was  made  looked 
up  —  great  scorn  upon  his  countenance. 

"  That  doesn't  hit  me,"  he  growled,  "  not  even  a  little 
bit.  I  live  in  New  York  —  live  in  Harlem,  to  be  more 
like  it,  and  work  down  in  Wall  street  —  use  the  subway 
twelve  times  a  week.  I  don't  have  to  come  to  Colorado 
to  ride  in  tunnels." 

Tourists  form  no  small  portion  of  Denver  industry. 
She  has  restaurants  and  souvenir  shops,  three  to  a  block ; 
seemingly  enough  high-class  hotels  for  a  town  three 
times  her  size.  Yet  the  restaurants  and  the  hotels 
are  always  filled,  the  little  shops  smile  in  the  sunshine 
of  brisk  prosperity.  And  as  for  "  rubberneck  wagons," 
Denver  has  as  many  as  New  York  or  Washington.  They 
are  omnipresent.  The  drivers  take  you  to  the  top  of  the 
park  system,  to  the  Cheesman  Memorial,  to  see  the  view. 


DENVER  271 

All  the  time  you  are  letting  your  eyes  revel  in  the  glories 
of  those  great  treeless  mountains,  the  megaphone  man 
is  dinning  into  your  ears  the  excellence  of  his  company's 
trips  in  Colorado  Springs,  in  Manitou,  in  Salt  Lake  City. 
He  assumes  that  you  are  a  tourist  and  that  you  will  have 
never  had  enough. 

Tourists  become  a  prosperous  industry  in  a  town  that 
has  no  particular  manufacturing  importance.  Great  idle 
plants,  the  busy  smelters  of  other  days,  bespeak  the  truth 
of  that  statement.  Denver,  as  far  as  she  has  any  com 
mercial  importance,  is  a  distributing  center.  Her  re 
tail  shops  are  excellent  and  her  wholesale  trade  extends 
over  a  dozen  great  western  states.  Her  banks  are 
powers,  her  influence  long  reaching.  But  she  is  not  an 
industrial  city. 

That  has  worried  her  very  much,  is  still  a  matter  of 
grave  concern  to  her  business  men.  Their  quarrels  with 
the  railroads  have  been  many  and  varied.  Denver  re 
alizes,  although  she  rarely  confesses  it,  that  she  has  dis 
advantages  of  location.  These  same  mountains  that  the 
tourist  comes  to  love  from  the  bottom  of  his  heart,  just 
as  the  Coloradians  have  loved  them  all  these  years,  are 
a  real  wall  hemming  her  in,  barriers  to  the  growth  of 
their  capital.  When  the  Union  Pacific  —  the  first  of 
all  the  transcontinental  railroads  —  was  built  through  to 
the  coast  it  was  forced,  by  the  mountains,  to  carry  its 
line  far  to  the  north  —  a  bitter  pill  to  the  ambitious  town 
that  was  just  then  beginning  to  come  into  its  own.  Den 
ver  sought  reprisals  by  building  the  narrow-gauge  Den 
ver  &  Rio  Grande,  a  most  remarkable  feat  of  railroad 
engineering;  bending  far  to  the  south  and  then  to  the 
north  and  west  through  the  narrow  niches  of  the  high 
mountains.  But  hardly  had  the  Denver  &  Rio  Grande 
assumed  any  real  importance  in  a  commercial  fashion 
and  the  mistake  of  its  first  narrow-guage  tracks  cor- 


272     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

rected,  before  it  was  joined  at  Pueblo  by  direct  routes 
to  the  east  and  Denver  was  again  isolated  from  through 
transcontinental  traffic.  She  was  then  and  still  is  reached 
by  side-lines. 

This  was  a  source  of  constant  aggravation  to  the  man 
who  was  until  his  death  two  or  three  years  ago,  Denver's 
first  citizen  —  David  H.  Moffat.  Mr.  Moffat's  interest 
and  pride  in  the  town  were  surpassing.  He  had  grown 
up  with  it  —  in  the  later  years  of  his  life  he  used  to 
boast  that  he  once  had  promoted  its  literature,  for  he 
had  come  to  Denver  when  it  was  a  mere  struggling  min 
ing-camp  as  a  peddler,  selling  to  the  miners  who  wanted 
to  write  home  a  piece  of  paper  and  a  stamped  envelope, 
for  five  cents. 

Moffat  saw  that  a  number  of  important  lines  were 
making  Denver  their  western  terminal  —  particularly 
the  Burlington  and  the  Kansas  stems  of  the  Union  Pa 
cific  and  the  Rock  Island.  He  felt  that  he  might  pick 
up  traffic  from  these  roads  and  carry  it  straight  over  the 
mountains  to  Salt  Lake  City,  a  railroad  center  suffer 
ing  the  same  disadvantages  as  Denver.  He  sent  surveyors 
up  into  the  deep  canyons  and  the  impasses  of  the 
Rockies.  When  they  brought  back  the  reports  of  their 
reconnaissances,  practical  railroad  men  laughed  at  Mr. 
Moffat. 

The  big  bankers  of  the  East  also  laughed  at  him  when 
he  came  to  them  with  the  scheme,  but  the  man  was  of 
the  sort  who  is  never  daunted  by  ridicule.  He  had  a 
sublime  faith  in  his  project,  and  when  men  told  him  that 
the  summit  of  10,000  feet  above  the  sea  level  where  he 
proposed  to  cross  the  divide  was  an  impossibility,  he 
would  retort  about  the  number  of  long  miles  he  was 
going  to  save  between  the  capital  of  Colorado  and  the 
capital  of  Utah  and  he  would  tell  of  the  single  Routt 
county  stretch,  a  territory  approximating  the  size  of  the 
state  of  Massachusetts  and  estimated  to  hold  enough  coal 


DENVER  273 

to  feed  the  furnace  fires  of  the  United  States  for  three 
hundred  years.  When  he  was  refused  money  in  New 
York  and  Chicago  he  would  return  to  Denver  and  some 
how  manage  to  raise  some  there.  •  The  Moffat  road 
was  begun,  despite  the  scoffers.  Its  promoter  made  re 
peated  trips  across  the  continent  to  secure  money,  and 
each  time  when  he  was  home  again  he  would  raise  the 
dollars  in  his  own  beloved  Denver  and  move  the  ter 
minal  of  his  road  west  a  few  miles.  He  was  at  it  until 
the  day  of  his  death  and  he  lived  long  enough  to  see 
his  railroad  within  short  striking  reach  of  the  treasures 
of  Routt  county. 

At  his  death  it  passed  into  the  hands  of  a  receiver,  and 
Denver  seemed  to  have  awakened  from  its  dream  of 
being  upon  the  trunk-line  of  a  transcontinental  railroad. 
But  there  were  hands  to  take  up  the  lines  where  Moffat 
had  dropped  them.  Times  might  have  been  hard  and 
loan  money  scarce  around  Colorado,  but  the  men  who 
were  taking  up  what  seemed  to  be  the  deathless  project 
of  Denver's  own  railroad  were  hardly  daunted.  In 
stead,  they  boldly  revised  Moffat's  profile  and  prepared 
to  cut  two  thousand  feet  off  the  backbone  of  the  con 
tinent  and  shorten  their  line  many  miles  by  digging  a 
tunnel  six  miles  long  and  costing  some  four  millions  of 
dollars.  Now  a  tunnel  six  miles  long  and  costing  $4,000,- 
ooo  is  quite  an  enterprise,  even  to  a  road  which  has 
boasted  thirty-two  of  them  in  a  single  day's  trip  up  to 
the  divide;  a  particularly  difficult  enterprise  to  a  road 
still  in  the  shadows  of  bankruptcy.  But  the  men  who 
were  directing  the  fortunes  of  the  Denver  &  Salt  Lake 
—  as  the  Moffat  road  is  now  known  —  had  a  plan. 
Would  not  the  city  of  Denver  lend  its  credit  to  an  enter 
prise  so  fraught  with  commercial  possibilities  for  it? 
Would  not  the  city  of  Denver  arrange  a  bond  issue  for 
the  digging  of  that  tunnel  —  incidentally  finding  therein 
a  good  investment  for  its  spare  dollars? 


274     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Would  Denver  do  that?  Ask  this  man  over  there. 
He  is  well  acquainted  with  the  Paris  of  America. 

"  Of  course  it  would,"  he  answers.  "  If  some  one 
was  to  come  along  with  a  scheme  to  expend  five  million 
dollars  in  building  a  statue  to  Jupiter  atop  of  Pikes 
Peak,  he  would  find  plenty  of  supporters  and  enthusi 
asm  in  Denver.  The  only  scheme  that  does  not  succeed 
out  there  is  the  one  that  is  practical." 

The  gentleman  is  sarcastic  —  and  yet  not  very  far 
from  the  truth.  For  last  year  when  the  bond  issue  for 
the  railroad  tunnel  went  to  a  vote  it  was  carried  —  with 
enthusiasm.  Thereafter  Denver  was  upon  the  trunk- 
line  railroad  map.  The  mere  facts  that  the  nine  miles 
of  tunnel  were  yet  to  be  bored  and  many  additional  miles 
of  the  most  difficult  railroad  construction  of  the  land 
builded  to  its  portals  were  mere  details.  The  thin  air 
of  the  Mile-High  city  lifts  its  citizens  well  over  details. 
And  they  are  far  too  broad,  far  too  generous  to  trouble 
with  such  minute  things. 

For  in  them  dwells  the  real  spirit  of  the  West  —  by 
this  time  no  mere  gateway  —  and  it  is  a  rare  spirit,  in 
deed.  The  town,  as  we  have  already  intimated,  has  a 
strong  social  tendency.  She  has  sent  her  men  and 
women,  her  sons  and  her  daughters  to  the  East  and  they 
have  won  for  themselves  on  their  own  merits.  The  Atlan 
tic  seaboard  has  paid  full  tribute  to  the  measure  of  her 
training  —  and  why  not?  Her  schools  are  as  good  as 
the  best,  her  fine  homes  and  her  little  homes  together 
would  be  a  credit  to  any  town  in  the  land,  her  big  clubs 
would  grace  Fifth  avenue.  Her  whole  social  organism 
from  bottom  to  top  is  well  fibered.  It  is  charmingly 
exclusive  in  one  way,  warmly  democratic  in  many  others. 

A  girl  tourist  from  Cleveland,  a  recent  summer,  es 
sayed  to  make  the  ascent  of  the  capitol  dome  between 
two  connecting  trains.  She  miscalculated  distances  dur 
ing  the  hour  and  a  half  that  was  at  her  disposal  and 


DENVER  275 

almost  missed  her  outbound  train.  She  surely  would 
have  missed  it,  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  courtesy  of  a 
well-dressed  Denver  woman.  The  girl  stood  at  the  cor 
ner  of  Seventeenth  street  and  Broadway,  where  a  group 
of  large  hotels  center,  waiting  for  a  trolley  car  to  take 
her  to  the  station.  She  could  see  its  sightly  tower  a 
long  way  down  Seventeenth  street,  but  there  were  no 
cars  in  sight  at  that  instant.  She  spoke  to  the  woman, 
who  was  coming  out  of  a  drug  store,  and  asked  about 
the  car  service  to  the  station.  In  the  East  she  might 
have  had  a  perfunctory  answer,  if  she  received  an  an 
swer  at  all.  The  Denver  woman  began  explaining,  then 
she  checked  herself : 

"  Better  yet,"  she  smiled,  "  I  have  my  automobile  here 
and  I'll  take  you  down  there  while  we  are  talking  about 
it." 

The  car  was  a  big  imported  fellow  and  the  girl  made 
her  train.  Some  time  after,  she  discovered  that  the 
woman  who  had  been  of  such  courteous  attention  was 
one  of  the  very  biggest  of  Denver  society  leaders.  Im 
agine,  if  you  can,  such  a  thing  coming  to  pass  upon  the 
Atlantic  seaboard  —  in  New  York,  in  Boston,  in  Phila 
delphia —  or  in  Charleston! 

There  is  still  another  phase  of  life  in  Denver  —  and 
that  is  the  fact  that  most  of  her  residents,  for  one  reason 
or  another,  have  drifted  out  to  her  from  the  East. 
Once  in  a  long  while,  if  you  loaf  over  your  morning 
newspaper  on  a  shady  bench  in  the  Capitol  grounds, 
you  will  become  acquainted  with  some  whiskered  old  fel 
low  who  will  tell  you  that  he  chased  antelope  where  the 
big  and  showy  City  Park  today  stands,  that  he  remem 
bers  clearly  when  a  nearby  street  was  the  Santa  Fe 
Trail  and  then  a  country  road,  and  that  two  genera 
tions  after  him  are  living  in  Denver;  or  sometimes  if 
you  go  down  into  Larimer  street,  which  is  old  Denver, 


276     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

you  can  find  a  veteran  who  likes  to  prate  of  other  days 
—  of  the  time  when  he  used  to  pack  down  to  the  capital 
from  his  mountain  claim,  one  hundred  and  twenty-five 
miles  over  the  mountain  snows,  for  his  winter's  bacon. 
But  the  majority  of  these  Denverites  have  come  from 
the  East.  There  is  some  old  town  in  New  England  with 
avenues  of  giant  trees  that  is  still  home  to  them,  and  yet 
they  all  have  a  heap  of  affection  for  the  city  of  their 
adoption. 

Some  of  them  have  gone  to  Denver  against  their  will, 
and  that  is  the  tragic  shadow  of  Colorado.  They  are 
expatriates  —  exiles,  if  you  please  —  for  Colorado  is  the 
American  Siberia.  This  dread  thing,  this  thing  that  is 
impartial  to  all  low  altitudes  —  the  white  plague  — 
marks  the  victims,  who  go  shuffling  their  way  to  die 
among  the  hills  —  in  the  gay  Paris  of  North  America. 
It  is  the  gaunt  tragedy  of  Denver,  and  even  though  the 
Denverites  speak  lightheartedly  of  the  "  T.  B.'s  "  who 
have  come  to  dwell  among  them,  they  themselves  know 
best  the  bitter  tragedy  of  it  all. 

Here  were  two  girls,  sisters,  who  worked  in  a  restau 
rant.  A  customer  held  his  home  newspaper  spread  as  he 
supped  alone.  Its  title,  after  the  fashion  of  country 
weeklies,  was  emblazoned  that  all  might  read;  the  wide 
spread  eagle  has  been  its  feature  for  three-quarters  of  a 
century  now.  One  of  the  waitresses  made  bold  to 
speak. 

"So  you  are  from  near  Syracuse?"  she  said. 

It  was  affirmed.  She  beckoned  to  her  sister  to  come 
over.  The  little  restaurant  —  Denver  fashion,  it  made 
specialities  of  "  short  orders,"  cream  waffles  and  T-bone 
steaks  —  was  almost  deserted.  She  spoke  to  her 
sister. 

"  He's  from  Syracuse,"  she  said.  The  sister  was  a 
delicate,  colorless  little  thing,  but  the  blood  flushed  up 
into  her  pale  cheeks  for  an  instant. 


DENVER  277 

"  We're  from  Syracuse,"  she  said  proudly.  "  We  used 
to  live  up  on  the  hill,  just  around  the  corner  from  the 
college.  It  was  great  fun  to  see  the  students  go  climb 
ing  up  around  Mount  Olympus  there.  It  was  twice  as 
great  fun  in  winter,  when  the  north  wind  was  blowing 
the  snow  right  up  into  our  faces." 

Exiles  these.  They  had  left  their  nice,  comfortable 
home  there  in  the  snug,  New  York  state  city  to  make 
the  long  dreary  trek  to  Denver.  They  were  clever  girls, 
and  it  seemed  certain  that  they  might  find  work  in 
some  nice  office  in  the  big  and  growing  Colorado  city. 
They  were  fairly  competent  stenographers,  and  it  seemed 
to  them  that  they  might  live  in  peace  and  comfort  in 
the  new  home.  It  was  a  change  from  their  big  Syra 
cuse  house  to  a  narrow  hallroom  in  a  Denver  boarding 
house.  Then  upon  that  came  the  fruitless  search  for  a 
"  nice  place."  Hundreds  of  other  girl  stenographers, 
driven  on  the  long  trip  West,  were  pressing  against  them. 
The  two  Syracusans  held  their  heads  high  —  for  a  time. 
Then  they  were  glad  to  get  the  menial  places  as  wait 
resses. 

The  man  who  checks  trunks  at  one  of  the  biggest 
transfer  companies  confessed  that  he  was  an  exile,  too. 

"  Came  out  here  a  dozen  years  ago  with  a  busted 
lung,"  he  admitted  with  a  quizzical  smile.  "  Guess  I'll 
stay  for  a  while  longer.  But  I  want  to  go  back  to  Bal 
timore.  Before  I  am  done  with  it  I  am  going  back  to 
Baltimore.  I'm  going  to  walk  down  Charles  street  once 
again  and  breathe  the  fragrance  of  the  flowers  in  the  gar 
dens,  if  it  kills  me." 

A  girl  in  a  boarding  house  leaned  up  against  the  wall 
of  the  broad  and  shady  piazza  and  said  she  liked  Denver 
"  really,  truly,  immensely." 

"Do  you  honestly?" 

"  Honestly,"  she  drawled  gravely.  "  God  knows,  I've 
got  to.  I'm  a  lunger,  although  they  don't  know  it  here. 


278     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

I've  only  got  one  lung,  but  it's  a  good  lung,"  she  ended 
with  a  little  hysterical  laugh. 

Another  exile.  The  American  Siberia,  in  truth,  save 
that  this  Siberia  is  a  near  Paradise  —  a  kingdom  for 
exiles  where  the  grass  is  as  green  as  it  is  back  in  the  old 
East,  where  the  trees  cast  welcome  shade  and  the  strange 
new  flowers  blossom  out  smiles  of  hope.  But  a  Siberia 
none  the  less.  The  big  sanitariums  all  about  the  city 
tell  that.  The  keeper  of  the  Denver  Morgue  will  tell 
it,  too.  The  suicide  rate  in  Denver  runs  high.  Des 
perate  folk  go  out  to  Colorado  to  shut  the  door  in  the 
face  of  death  —  and  go  too  late.  They  are  far  from 
home,  alone,  friendless,  penniless  in  despair  —  the  figures 
of  the  statisticians  cannot  lie. 

The  East  has  this  as  a  debt  to  pay  Denver,  and 
generally  she  pays  it  royally.  Denver  does  not  forget 
the  times  when  the  Atlantic  seaboard  has  come  to  her 
assistance  —  despite  the  troubles  of  David  H.  Moffat 
in  raising  capital  for  his  railroad.  Once  in  a  business 
council  there  while  the  East  was  getting  some  rather 
hard  knocks  for  its  "  fool  conservatism  " —  perhaps  it 
had  been  refusing  to  buy  the  bonds  of  the  mountain- 
climbing  railroad  —  a  big  Denver  banker  got  the 
floor.  He  was  a  man  who  could  demand  attention  — 
and  receive  it. 

"  I  want  you  to  remember  one  thing,"  he  said ;  "  fif 
teen  years  ago  we  were  laying  out  and  selling  town-lots 
for  a  dozen  miles  east  of  Denver ;  we  were  selling  them  to 
Easterners  —  for  their  good  money.  When  they  came 
out  and  looked  for  their  land  what  did  they  see?  They 
saw  plains  —  mile  after  mile  of  plains  —  peopled  by 
what?  They  were  peopled  by  jackrabbits,  and  the  jack- 
rabbits  were  bald  from  bumping  their  heads  against  the 
surveyors'  stakes.  Until  we  have  redeemed  those  lots 
and  built  our  city  out  to  them  and  upon  them,  gentlemen, 
we  have  not  redeemed  our  promise  to  the  East/' 


DENVER  279 

And  no  one  who  knows  Denver  doubts  that  the  time 
will  yet  come  when  she  will  redeem  that  promise.  Her 
railroad  may  or  may  not  come  to  be  a  transcontinental 
route  of  importance,  manufacturing  may  or  may  not  de 
scend  upon  her  with  its  grime  and  industry  and  wealth, 
but  her  magnificent  situation  there  at  the  base  of  the 
Rockies  will  continue  to  make  her  at  least  a  social  factor 
in  the  gradually  lengthening  roll  of  really  vital  Ameri 
can  cities. 


i8 

TWO  RIVALS  OF  THE  NORTH  PACIFIC  — AND 
A  THIRD 

44TY  THEN  you  get  to  Portland  you  will  see  New 

\\     England  transplanted.     You  will  see  the  most 

American  town  on  the  continent,  bar  only  Philadelphia." 

The  man  on  the  train  shrieking  westward  down 
through  the  marvelous  valley  of  the  Columbia  spoke  like 
an  oracle.  He  had  a  little  group  of  oddly  contorted 
valises  that  bespoke  him  as  a  traveling  salesman,  and 
hence  a  person  of  some  discrimination  and  judgment. 
He  was  ready  to  talk  politics,  war  to  the  death  on  rail 
roads,  musical  comedy  and  the  condition  of  the  mar 
kets  with  an  equally  uncertain  knowledge,  a  fund  of 
priceless  information  that  never  permitted  itself  to  under 
go  even  the  slightest  correction. 

But  he  was  right,  absolutely  right,  about  Portland. 
From  the  cleanest  railroad  station  that  we  have  ever 
seen,  even  though  the  building  is  more  than  twenty  years 
old,  to  the  very  crests  of  the  fir-lined  hills  that  wall  her 
in,  here  is  a  town  that  is  so  absolutely  American,  that  it 
seems  as  if  she  might  even  boast  one  of  the  innumera 
ble  George  Washington  headquarters  somewhere  on  her 
older  streets.  Her  downtown  streets  are  conservatively 
narrow,  her  staunch  Post  Office  suggests  a  public  build 
ing  in  one  of  the  older  cities  on  the  Atlantic  coast,  and 
her  shops  are  a  medley  of  delights,  with  apparently  about 
thirty  percent  of  them  given  over  to  the  retail  vending  of 
chocolate.  Our  Portland  guide  was  grieved  when  we 
made  mention  of  this  last  fact. 

280 


PORTLAND  —  SEATTLE  —  TACOMA   281 

"  I  once  went  to  Boston,"  said  he,  "  and  found  it  an 
almost  continuous  piano  store." 

Which  was,  of  course,  a  mere  evasion  of  the  truth  of 
our  suggestion  as  to  the  chocolate  propensities  of  the 
maids  of  Portland.  They  are  very  much  like  the  girls 
in  Hartford  or  Indianapolis  or  St.  Paul  or  any  other 
bustling  town  across  this  land,  attending  the  Saturday 
matinees  with  an  almost  festal  regularity;  rollicking, 
flirting  girls,  grave  and  gay,  girls  dancing  and  girls 
driving  their  big  six-cylinder  automobiles  with  almost 
unerring  accuracy  up  the  tremendous  hills  of  the  town. 

Hills  they  really  are  and  well  worth  the  tall  climb  to 
Council  Crest,  the  showiest  of  them  all.  If  your  host 
does  not  mind  tire  expense  and  the  wear  and  tear  on  his 
engine,  he  may  take  you  up  there  in  his  automobile. 
The  street  car  makes  the  same  ascent,  and  the  managers 
of  the  local  traction  system  who  have  to  pay  for  all  the 
repairs  and  renewals  to  the  cars  do  not  hesitate  to  say 
that  it  is  the  least  profitable  line  in  creation.  But  the 
final  result  at  Council  Crest  is  worth  a  set  of  tires,  or  a 
six-months'  ageing  of  a  trolley  car. 

You  have  climbed  up  from  the  heart  of  the  busy  town, 
past  the  business  section,  spreading  itself  out  as  business 
sections  of  all  successful  towns  must  continue  to  do, 
past  the  trim  snug  little  white  Colonial  houses  —  that 
must  have  been  stolen  from  old  Salem  or  Newburyport 
—  all  set  among  the  dark  greens  of  the  cedars  and  the 
firs,  and  belying  the  Northland  tales  of  the  tree  foliage 
by  the  great  rose-bushes  that  bloom  all  the  year  round, 
up  on  to  the  place  where  tradition  says  the  silent  chiefs 
of  red  men  used  to  gather.  .  .  .  Below  you  from  Coun 
cil  Crest  the  town  —  the  town,  at  dusk,  if  you  please. 
The  arcs  are  showing  the  regular  pattern  of  trim  streets, 
the  shops  and  the  big  office  buildings  are  aglow  for  the 
night  with  the  brilliancy  of  artificial  illumination.  It  is 
dark  down  in  the  town  —  night  has  closed  in  upon  it. 


282     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Now  lift  your  eyes  and  let  them  carry  past  the  town 
and  the  black  gloom  of  the  river,  over  the  nearest  en- 
circlings  of  the  fir-clad  hills  and  see  the  day  die  in  the 
most  high  place.  You  see  it  now  —  a  peculiar  pink 
cloud,  which  is  not  a  cloud  at  all,  but  a  snow-capped 
cone-shaped  peak  rising  into  the  darkening  heavens. 
Mount  Hood  is  an  asset  for  Portland,  because  for  any 
habitation  of  man  it  would  be  an  inspiration.  And  be 
yond  Mount  Hood  —  fifty  miles  distant  —  but  further 
to  the  north  are  Mount  Adams,  Mount  St.  Helen's  and 
sometimes  on  a  fine  clear  evening  Rainier  bidding  alike 
brilliant  farewells  to  the  dying  day. 

This  then  is  the  city  into  which  a  traveler  may  enter 
on  an  autumn  day  to  find  the  innumerable  cedars  and 
firs,  the  changing  brilliancy  of  the  maple  leaves  proclaim 
ing  it  North,  with  the  gaily  blossoming  rose-bushes  and 
the  home-grown  strawberries  of  October  telling  a  para 
doxical  story  and  locating  the  Oregon  metropolis  to  the 
South.  The  publicity  experts  of  the  town  can  —  and 
do  —  sound  its  praises  in  no  faint  terms.  They  will 
tell  you  of  a  single  day  when  twenty-two  wheat  vessels 
were  at  Portland  docks  gathering  the  food-stuffs  for 
a  hungry  Orient,  they  will  reel  off  statistics  as  to  the 
shipping  powers  of  the  great  lumber  port  in  all  the 
world  and  then,  without  a  lessening  of  the  pride,  will 
go  further  and  explain  Portland's  hopes  for  the  further 
inland  navigation  of  the  streams  that  make  her  an  im 
portant  ocean  port  although  fifty  miles  distant  from  the 
sight  of  the  sea.  The  Columbia  river  is  already  naviga 
ble  for  four  hundred  miles  inland  and  Portland  is  today 
cooperating  with  the  Canadian  authorities  in  British 
Columbia  for  extending  the  waterway's  availability  as  a 
carrier  for  another  four  hundred  miles.  A  great  work 
has  been  performed  in  pulling  the  teeth  of  the  mighty 
Columbia  where  it  meets  the  sea  —  in  building  jetties  at 
the  mouth  of  the  river.  The  government  with  unusual 


PORTLAND  —  SEATTLE  —  TACOMA   283 

energy  is  making  new  locks  at  the  impressive  Cascades. 
Portland  has  good  reason  for  her  faith  in  the  future. 
Her  railroad  systems  are  in  their  infancy ;  a  part  of  Cen 
tral  Oregon  as  large  as  the  state  of  Ohio  is  just  now  being 
reached  by  through  routes  from  Portland.  What  future 
they  shall  bring  her  no  man  dares  to  predict. 

But  we,  for  ourselves,  shall  like  to  continue  to  think 
of  Portland  as  a  gentle  American  town  set  between 
guardian  fir-clad  hills  and  sentineled  by  snow-capped 
peaks;  we  shall  enjoy  remembering  the  yellow  and  red 
leaves  of  Autumn,  the  luxuriant  roses,  the  strawberries 
and  the  crisp  October  nights  in  one  delightful  paradoxical 
jumble. 

To  make  a  great  seaport  city  out  of  a  high-springing 
ridge  of  volcanic  origin  was  a  truly  herculean  task,  but 
Seattle  sprang  to  it  with  all  the  enthusiasm  of  her  youth. 
"  Re-grading "  is  what  she  has  called  it,  and  because 
even  armies  of  men  with  pick  and  with  shovel  could  not 
work  fast  enough  for  her  own  satisfaction,  she  borrowed 
a  trick  from  the  old-time  gold  miners  and  put  hose-men 
at  work.  Hydraulic  science  supplanted  men  and  teams 
and  picks  and  even  the  big  steam  shovels.  The  splash 
ing  hose  wore  down  the  crest  of  the  great  hills  until 
sturdy  buildings  teetered  on  their  foundations  and  late 
moving  tenants  had  to  come  and  go  up  and  down  long 
ladders. 

In  1 88 1  President  Hayes  came  to  this  strange  little 
lumbering  town  and  spoke  from  the  platform  of  the  two- 
storied  Occidental  Hotel  in  the  center  of  the  village  to 
its  entire  population  —  some  five  hundred  persons.  The 
Occidental  Hotel  was  gone  within  ten  years,  to  be  re 
placed  by  a  hostelry  that  in  1890  was  big  and  showy  for 
any  town  and  that  in  1912,  Seattle  regarded  almost  as  a 
relic  of  past  ages.  And  stranger  still,  the  hills  —  the 
eternal  hills,  if  you  please  —  that  looked  upon  the  Occi- 


284     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

dental  Hotel  only  yesterday,  have  gone.  Not  that  Seattle 
will  not  always  be  a  side-hill  town,  that  the  cable  cars 
will  not  continue  to  climb  up  Madison  street  from  the 
waterfront  like  flies  upon  a  window-glass,  but  that  a 
tremendous  reformation  has  been  wrought,  with  the  aid 
of  engineers'  skill  and  the  famous  "  hard  money  "  of  the 
Pacific  coast. 

For  here  was  a  town  that  decided  almost  overnight  to 
be  a  seaport  of  world-wide  reputation.  She  looked  at 
her  high  hills  ruefully.  Then  she  called  for  the  hose- 
men.  The  hills  were  doomed. 

There  was  Denny  hill,  with  a  park  of  five  acres  capping 
it.  The  surveyors  set  their  rival  stakes  five  hundred  feet 
below  the  lowest  level  of  the  little  park  and  a  matter  of 
almost  a  million  cubic  yards  of  earth  went  sploshing 
down  the  long  hydraulic  sluices  to  make  the  tide-water 
flats  at  the  bottom  of  the  hills  into  solid  footing  for  fu 
ture  factories  and  warehouses.  And  when  the  "  re- 
graders  "  were  done  the  architects  and  the  builders  were 
upon  their  heels. 

Denny  hill  had  boasted  a  hotel  upon  its  summit,  which 
in  the  late  eighties  Seattle  regarded  as  an  architectural 
triumph,  a  wooden  thing  of  angles  and  shingles  and  queer 
Queen  Anne  turrets  and  dormers.  The  name  of  the  old 
hotel  went  to  a  new  one  which  supplanted  it  at  a  proper 
altitude  for  a  city  that  was  determined  to  be  metropoli 
tan  —  and  the  new  hotel  was  a  dignified  structure  worthy 
of  the  best  town  in  all  this  land. 

"  We  had  to  do  it,"  the  Seattle  man  will  tell  you,  with 
out  smiling.  "  We  have  got  to  be  ready  for  a  popula 
tion  of  a  million  or  more.  Our  house  has  got  to  be  in 
order." 

It  is  not  every  day  that  one  can  see  an  American  met 
ropolitan  city  in  the  making. 

Back  of  the  high-crested  hills  that  have  been  suffered 


PORTLAND  —  SEATTLE  —  TACOMA   285 

to  remain  as  a  part  of  the  topography  of  this  remark 
able  town  —  for  its  residents  still  like  to  perch  their  smart 
new  houses  where  they  may  command  a  view  of  Puget 
Sound  or  the  snow-capped  Rainier  —  is  as  lovely  a  chain 
of  lakes  as  was  ever  given  to  an  American  city.  Boston 
would  have  made  the  edges  of  these  the  finest  suburbs 
in  the  land ;  she  is  trying  some  sort  of  an  experiment  of 
that  kind  with  her  dirty  old  Charles  river.  Seattle  saw  in 
the  great  bowl  of  Lake  Washington  something  more. 

"  We  can  crowd  into  Portland  a  little  more,"  said  the 
shrewdest  of  her  citizens,  "  by  making  this  lake  into  a 
fresh-water  harbor." 

Just  what  the  advantages  of  a  fresh-water  harbor  may 
be  to  Seattle  which  already  possesses  one  of  the  finest 
deep-water  harbors  on  the  North  Pacific,  may  be  ob 
scure  to  you  for  the  moment.  Then  the  Seattle  man  in 
forms  you  that  Portland  has  a  fresh-water  harbor,  that 
the  masters  of  ships,  still  thirty  days'  sailing  from  port, 
make  for  its  haven,  knowing  that  in  fresh  water  the  bar 
nacles  that  make  so  great  a  drag  upon  a  vessel's  progress 
will  fall  away  from  the  hull.  A  fresh-water  bath  for  a 
salt-water  hull  is  better  than  a  drain-off  in  a  dry  dock 
—  and  a  great  sight  cheaper. 

Here,  then,  is  a  masterful  new  town  seeking  new  points 
of  advantage  over  its  rivals,  piercing  canals  through  to 
its  backyard  lakes  so  that  it  may  eventually  be  as  com 
pletely  surrounded  by  docks  and  shipping  as  are  New 
York  and  Boston.  It  is  impossible  to  think  of  Seattle 
ever  hesitating.  Seattle  proceeds  to  accomplish.  Be 
fore  she  has  a  real  opportunity  to  count  the  cost,  the  im 
provements  which  she  has  undertaken  are  rolling  in  rev 
enue  to  her  coffers. 

Tacoma  is  smaller  than  either  Seattle  or  Portland  — 
and  not  one  whit  less  vigorous  than  either  of  them.  She 
has  not  undergone  the  wholesale  transformations  of  her 


286     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

sister  to  the  north  and  still  retains  all  the  aspects  of  a 
busy  port  of  the  Far  North  —  long  reaching  wharves, 
busy,  dirty  railroad  yards  reaching  and  serving  them,  fir- 
clad  hills  rising  from  the  water,  the  smell  and  industry 
of  lumber  —  and  back  of  all  these  her  mountain.  It  is 
her  mountain  — "  The  Mountain  that  was  God  "  as  the 
Indians  used  to  say  —  and  if  for  long  weeks  it  may  stay 
modestly  hidden  behind  fog-banks,  there  do  come  days 
when  its  great  snow-capped  peak  gazes  serenely  down 
upon  the  little  city. 

Do  not  dare  to  come  into  this  town  and  call  her  moun 
tain  Rainier,  after  the  fashion  of  government  "  map 
sharps  "  and  railroad  advertisements.  It  is  Mount  Ta- 
coma,  if  you  please,  and  woe  be  to  any  man  who  calls  it 
anything  else.  Former  President  Taft  once  shouldered 
the  question  upon  reaching  the  northwestern  corner  of  the 
land  like  a  true  diplomat.  At  the  dinners  in  both  Seattle 
and  Tacoma  he  referred  to  the  great  guardian  peak  of 
Washington  as  "  the  mountain  "  thereby  offending  no  one 
and  leaving  a  pleasant  "  lady  or  the  tiger  "  mystery  as 
to  which  of  the  two  names  he  would  use  in  private  con 
versation. 

But  whether  the  mountain  be  Rainier  or  Tacoma,  it 
is  going  to  be  one  of  the  great  playgrounds  of  the  nation 
—  and  that  within  very  few  years.  Think  of  starting 
out  from  a  brisk  American  city  of  a  hundred  thousand 
population  and  within  two  hours  standing  at  the  foot  of 
a  giant  glacier  grinding  down  from  the  heavens,  a  cold, 
dead,  icy  thing  but  still  imbued  with  the  stubborn  sort  of 
life  that  stunted  vegetable  growths  possess,  a  life  that 
makes  the  frozen  river  travel  toward  the  sea  every  day 
of  the  year.  A  man  living  in  Tacoma,  or  Seattle,  or  Port 
land,  for  that  matter,  can  have  both  the  dangers  and  the 
joys  of  Swiss  mountain  climbing  but  a  few  hours  dis 
tant.  It  takes  knowledge  and  courage  to  make  the  as 
cent  of  Rainier  —  a  tedious  trip  which  starts  through  the 


PORTLAND  —  SEATTLE  —  TACOMA   287 

three  summer  months  in  which  it  is  possible  at  five 
o'clock  in  the  morning  so  as  to  reach  the  summit  before 
the  snows  begin  to  melt  to  the  danger  point.  And  yet, 
in  the  hands  of  skilled  guides,  so  many  women  cross  the 
crevices  and  climb  the  steep  upward  trails,  that  the  record 
of  their  ascents  is  no  longer  kept. 

This  great  Swiss  mountain  —  higher  than  Blanc,  and 
vastly  more  impressive  from  the  fact  that  its  fourteen 
thousand  foot  summit  rises  almost  directly  from  the  sea 
—  is  the  central  feature  of  the  newest  of  all  the  govern 
ment  parks.  It  is  in  the  stages  of  early  development  and 
already  the  tourists  are  coming  to  it  in  increasing  num 
bers.  Given  a  few  years  and  Rainier  will  vie  in  popu 
larity  with  the  Yellowstone,  the  Yosemite  and  the  Grand 
Canyon  of  the  Colorado.  In  scenic  beauty  of  its  own 
inimitable  sort  it  already  ranks  with  these. 

The  man  who  makes  the  ascent  of  Rainier  —  if  poetry 
and  imagination  rest  within  his  soul  —  may  truly  feel 
that  he  has  come  near  to  God.  He  can  feel  the  ardor 
and  the  inspiration  of  the  red  men  who  gave  the  moun 
tain  its  mystic  symbolism.  He  can  look  up  into  the 
clouds  and  feel  that  he  is  at  the  dome  of  the  world.  He 
can  look  down,  down  past  the  timber  line  off  across  miles 
of  timber  land  and  catch  the  silver  of  Puget  Sound  and 
the  distant  horizon  flash  of  the  Pacific.  He  can  see 
smoke  to  the  south  —  Portland  —  smoke  to  the  north  and 
west  —  Seattle  —  and  nearer  than  these  —  the  brisk  Ta- 
coma  that  hugs  this  mountain  to  herself. 

If  imagination  rest  within  him  he  can  now  know  that 
these  cities,  at  the  northwest  corner  of  America,  are 
barely  adult,  just  beginning  to  come  into  their  own.  A 
great  measure  of  growth  and  strength  is  yet  to  be  given 
to  them. 


19 

SAN  FRANCISCO  —  THE  NEWEST  PHOENIX 

WE  came  upon  it  in  the  still  of  an  early  Sunday 
evening  —  the  wonderful  city  of  Saint  Francis. 
Throughout  that  cloudless  Sabbath  we  had  journeyed 
southward  through  California.  At  dawn  the  porter  of 
the  sleeping  car  had  informed  us  that  we  were  in  the 
Golden  State,  not  to  be  distinguished  in  its  northern 
reaches  from  Oregon.  Men  were  talking  of  the  won 
ders  of  the  Klamath  country  into  which  the  civilizing 
rails  of  steel  are  being  steadily  pushed,  the  breath  of  to 
morrow  was  upon  the  lips  of  every  one  who  boarded  the 
train,  but  the  land  itself  was  wild,  half-timbered,  rugged 
to  the  last  degree.  Through  the  morning  grays  the  vol 
canic  cone  of  Shasta  was  showing  ever  and  ever  so 
faintly,  and  if  an  acquaintance  of  two  hours  with  the 
peak  that  Joaquin  Miller  has  made  so  famous  did  not 
enthuse  the  man  behind  the  car-window,  it  must  have 
been  that  he  was  still  a  bit  dazed,  not  surfeited,  with  the 
wonders  of  Rainier. 

At  the  foot  of  Shasta  our  train  stood  for  a  bare  ten 
minutes  while  travelers  descended  and  partook  of  the 
vilest  tasting  waters  that  nature  might  boast  in  all  Cali 
fornia.  Shasta  spring  water  is  supposed  to  be  mightily 
beneficial  and  that  is  probably  true,  for  our  experience 
with  spring  waters  has  been  that  their  benefits  have  ex 
isted  in  an  inverse  ratio  to  their  pleasantness  of  taste. 
But  if  Nature  had  given  her  benefactions  to  Shasta  a 
sort  of  Spartan  touch,  she  has  more  than  compensated 
for  the  severity  of  her  gifts  by  the  beauty  of  their  set- 

288 


SAN  FRANCISCO  289 

ting.  You  literally  descend  directly  upon  the  springs. 
The  railroad  performs  earthly  miracles  to  land  a  pas 
senger  in  front  of  them.  It  descends  a  vast  number  of 
feet  in  an  incredibly  short  length  of  track  —  the  con 
ductor  will  reduce  these  to  cold  statistics  —  and  your 
idea  is  a  quick  drop  on  a  gigantic  hair-pin.  At  the 
base  of  the  lowest  leg  of  this  hair-pin  is  the  spring,  set 
in  a  deep  glen,  the  mossy  banks  of  which  are  constantly 
adrip  and  seemingly  one  great  slow-moving  waterfall, 
even  throughout  the  fearfully  dry  seasons  of  California. 
The  whole  thing  is  distinctly  European,  distinctly  dif 
ferent  —  a  bit  of  Swiss  scenery  root-dug  and  brought 
to  the  West  Coast  of  the  United  States. 

After  Shasta  and  the  springs,  another  of  the  desolate, 
fascinating  canyons  to  be  threaded  for  many  miles  be 
sides  the  twistings  of  a  melancholy  river,  then  —  of  a 
sudden  —  open  country,  farmers  growing  green  things, 
ranch-houses,  dusty  county-roads,  with  automobiles 
plowing  them  dustier  still,  little  towns,  more  ranches 
—  everything  in  California  from  two  to  two  million 
acres  is  a  ranch  —  then  a  grinding  of  air-brakes  and 
your  neighbor  across  the  aisle  is  fumbling  with  his  red- 
covered  time-table  to  locate  the  station  upon  it.  As  for 
you,  you  don't  care  about  what  station  it  really  may  be. 
It  is  a  station.  You  are  sure  of  that.  There  is  the  fa 
miliar  light  yellow  depot,  but  in  the  well-kept  lawn  that 
abuts  it  grows  a  giant  tree.  That  tree  is  a  palm,  and 
the  palm-tree  typifies  California  to  every  tingling  sense 
of  your  mentality. 

This  is  the  real  California.  The  mountains  have  al 
ready  become  accustomed  things  to  you,  the  broad 
ranches  were  coming  into  their  own  before  you  ever 
reached  Denver,  but  the  palm  is  exotic  in  your  homeland, 
a  glass-protected  thing.  That  it  grows  freely  beside  this 
little  unidentified  railroad  station  proclaims  to  you  that 
you  are  at  last  in  a  land  that  bids  defiance  to  that  trinity 


290     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

of  scourging  giants  —  December,  January  and  February 
—  and  calls  itself  summer  the  whole  year  round. 

This  palm  has  brought  you  to  a  sense  of  your  loca 
tion  —  to  California.  The  romance  that  has  been  spelled 
into  you  of  a  distant  land,  and  of  the  men  who  toiled 
that  it  become  a  great  state  peopled  with  great  cities, 
of  Nature's  lavish  gifts  and  terrific  blows  laid  alike  upon 
it,  came  into  your  heart  and  soul  and  body  at  the  first 
glimpse  of  that  tree.  Before  the  train  is  under  way  again 
your  camera  has  been  called  into  action  —  mental  proc 
esses  are  supplemented  by  a  permanent  record  chemi 
cally  etched  upon  a  film  of  celluloid. 

After  that  pioneer  among  palm-trees,  more  of  these 
little  yellow  depots  and  more  of  these  rarely  beautiful 
palms  standing  beside  them.  The  ranches  multiply,  this 
valley  of  Sacramento  is  a  rarely  fertile  thing.  Growth 
stretches  for  miles,  without  ever  a  hint  of  undulation. 
California  is  the  flattest  thing  you  have  ever  seen.  And 
again  and  again  you  will  be  declaring  it  the  most  moun 
tainous  of  all  our  states.  The  flat-lands  carry  you  beyond 
daylight  into  dusk.  The  towns  multiply,  a  glow  of  arc 
reflection  against  the  shadows  of  evening  is  Sacramento 
a  dozen  miles  distant.  Then  there  is  a  rattle  of  switches, 
a  halt  at  a  junction  station,  and  mail  is  being  gathered 
from  the  impromptu  literature  makers  on  our  train  to 
go  east.  The  main  line  is  reached.  And  a  little  later 
the  Straits  of  Costa  are  crossed.  Here  is  a  broad  arm  of 
the  sea  and  if  it  were  still  lingering  daylight  you  might 
declare  that  Holland,  not  Switzerland,  had  been  trans 
planted  into  California.  The  sea  laughs  at  bridges,  and 
so  from  Benecia  to  Port  Costa  we  go  on  a  great  ferry 
boat,  eleven  Pullmans,  a  great  ten-drivered  passenger 
locomotive  —  all  of  us  together.  For  twenty  minutes  we 
slip  across  the  water,  breathing  fresh  air  once  again  and 
standing  in  the  ferry's  bow  looking  toward  the  shadowy 
outline  of  a  high,  black  hill  carelessly  punctuated  here 


SAN  FRANCISCO  291 

and  there  by  yellow  points  of  light.  A  new  land  is 
always  mysterious  and  fascinating;  by  night  doubly  mys 
terious,  doubly  fascinating. 

The  ferry  boat  fast  to  its  bridge,  the  locomotive  is  no 
longer  an  impotent  thing.  We  are  making  the  last  stage 
of  a  long  trip  across  the  continent  by  rail.  The 
little  towns  are  multiplying.  The  subtle  prescience 
of  a  great  city  is  upon  us.  We  turn  west,  then  south 
and  the  suburban  villages  are  shouldering  one  another 
all  the  more  closely  the  entire  way.  We  skirt  and  barely 
miss  Berkeley,  hesitate  at  Oakland  and  then  come  to  a 
grinding  final  stop  at  the  end  of  a  pier  that  juts  itself 
far  out  beyond  the  shallow  reaches  of  San  Francisco  bay. 
Again  there  is  a  ferry  boat  —  a  capacious  craft  not  un 
like  those  craft  upon  which  we  have  ridden  time  and  time 
again  between  Staten  island  and  the  tip  of  Manhattan 
—  and  when  its  screws  have  ceased  to  turn  we  will  finally 
be  in  the  real  San  Francisco,  reached  as  a  really  great 
metropolis  may  be  reached,  after  an  infinitude  of  time 
and  trouble.  /It  is  still  October  —  the  warmest  month 
of  the  year  in  the  city  by  the  Golden  Gate  —  and  the  girls 
and  their  young  men  fill  the  long  benches  on  the  open 
decks  of  the  ferry.  The  wind  blows  soft  from  the  Pa 
cific,  and  straight  ahead  is  San  Francisco  —  a  mystery 
of  yellow  illumination  rising  from  the  water's  edge. 

As  the  ferry  makes  her  course,  the  goal  is  less  and  less 
of  a  mystery.  Street  lights  begin  to  give  some  sort  of 
half-coherent  form  to  the  high  hills  that  make  the  amphi 
theater  site  of  San  Francisco,  they  dip  in  even  lines  to 
show  the  course  of  straight  avenues.  A  great  beer  sign 
changes  and  rechanges  in  spelling  its  lively  message, 
there  is  a  moon-faced  clock  held  aloft,  you  pinch  your 
memory  sharply,  and  then  know  that  it  must  be  the 
tower  of  the  great  ferry-house,  the  conspicuous  water 
front  land-mark  of  San  Francisco. 

In  another  five  minutes  you  are  passing  under  that 


292      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

tower  —  a  veritable  gate-keeper  of  the  city  —  and  facing 
up  Market  street;  from  the  beginning  its  undisputed 
chief  thoroughfare.  A  taxicab  is  standing  there.  You 
throw  your  hand-baggage  into  it,  come  tumbling  after, 
yourself.  There  is  a  confusion  of  street-lights,  a  mo- 
mentary  intimacy  of  a  trolley  car  running  alongside  — 
a  little  later  the  glare  and  confusion  of  a  hotel  lobby, 
the.  fascinating  fuss  of  getting  yourself  settled  in  a 
strange  town.  There  is  a  double  witchery  in  approach 
ing  a  great  new  city  at  night. 

In  the  morning  to  tumble  out  of  your  hotel  into  that 
same  strange  town  in  the  clarity  of  early  sunshine,  to 
have  this  great  street  or  that  or  that  —  Market  or  Geary 
or  Powell  —  stretching  forth  as  if  longing  to  invite^your 
explorations  —  here  again  is  the  fascination  of  travel. 
The  big  trolley  cars  come  rolling  up  Market  street  in 
quick  succession,  and  for  an  instant  their  appeal  is 
strong.  But  over  there  is  a  car  of  another  sort,  running 
on  narrow-gauge  tracks  and  with  the  roar  of  an  endless 
cable  ever  at  work  beneath  the  pavement.  The  little 
cars  upon  those  narrow  tracks  interest  you.  They  are  as 
gaily  colored  and  as  bravely  striped  as  any  circus  wagon 
of  boyhood  days,  and  when  you  pay  your  fare  you  can 
take  your  choice  —  between  the  interior  of  a  stuffy  little 
cabin  amidships  or  open  seats  at  either  end  arranged 
after  the  time-honored  fashion  of  Irish  jaunting  cars. 
San  Franciscans  do  not  hesitate.  They  range  themselves 
along  the  open  seats  of  the  dinky  cars  and  look  proud 
as  toads  as  the  cars  go  clanking  up  the  awful  hills. 

The  San  Francisco  cable  car  is  in  a  transportation 
class  by  itself.  It  clings  tenaciously  to  early  traditions. 
For  in  San  Francisco  the  cable  railroad  was  born  —  and 
in  San  Francisco  the  cable  railroad  still  remains.  One 
Andrew  S.  Halladie  was  its  inventor  —  somewhere  early 
in  the  "  seventies."  Up  Clay  street  hill,  and  to  know 
and  appreciate  the  slope  of  Clay  street  hill  one  must 


SAN  FRANCISCO  293 

have  seen  it  once  at  least,  Halladie's  first  car  struggled, 
while  its  passengers  held  their  breaths  just  as  first-comers 
to  San  Francisco  still  hold  their  breaths  as  they  ride  up 
and  down  the  fearful  hills.  The  telegraph  told  to  the 
whole  land  how  a  street  railroad  was  running  on  a  rope 
out  in  that  little-known  land  of  marvels  —  California. 
But  the  telegraph  could  not  tell  what  the  railroad  on  a 
rope  meant  to  San  Francisco  —  San  Francisco  encom 
passed  and  held  in  by  her  high  sand  hills.  The  Clay 
street  cable  road  had  conquered  one  of  the  meanest  of 
these  hills  and  they  began  to  plan  other  roads  of  a  similar 
sort.  Like  a  blossoming  and  growing  vine  the  city 
spread,  almost  overnight.  Sand-dunes  became  building- 
lots  of  high  value  and  a  new  bonanza  era  was  come  to 
San  Francisco.  And,  with  the  traditional  generosity  of 
the  coast,  she  gave  her  transportation  idea  to  other 
cities.  In  a  little  while  St.  Louis,  Chicago,  Washington 
and  New  York  were  banishing  the  horse  cars  from  their 
busiest  streets.  A  new  era  in  city  transit  was  begun. 

A  few  years  later  the  broomstick  trolley  —  cheaper 
and  in  many  respects  far  more  efficient  —  displaced  the 
cable-cars  in  many  of  these  cities.  But  San  Francisco 
up  to  the  present  time  has  stuck  loyally  to  her  old-time 
hill  conquerors.  And  the  nervous  lever-clutch  of  the 
gripman  as  he  "  gets  the  rope  "  is  as  distinctive  of  her  as 
are  the  fantasies  of  her  marvelous  wooden  architecture. 

Some  of  the  cable  cars  have  disappeared  —  they  began 
to  go  in  those  wonderful  years  of  reconstruction  right 
after  the  fire,  and  they  are  already  obsolete  in  the  city's 
chief  thoroughfare,  Market  street.  The  others  remain. 
Over  on  Pacific  avenue  is  a  little  line  that  the  San  Fran 
ciscans  dearly  love,  for  it  is  particularly  reminiscent  of 
the  trams  that  used  to  clatter  through  Market  street  be 
fore  the  fire  —  a  diminutive  summer-house  in  front  and 
pulling  an  immaculate  little  horseless  horse  car  behind. 
Eventually  all  will  go.  One  road's  franchise  has  already 


294     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

expired  and  upon  it  San  Francisco  is  today  maintaining 
the  first  municipally  operated  street  car  line  in  any  met 
ropolitan  city  of  America.  If  the  experiment  in  Geary 
street  succeeds,  and  it  is  being  carefully  operated  with 
such  a  hope  clearly  in  view,  it  will  probably  be  extended 
to  the  cable  lines  when  their  franchises  expire  and  they 
revert  automatically  to  the  city. 

The  distinctive  mannerisms  of  San  Francisco  are 
changing  —  slowly  but  very  surely  indeed.  Some  of 
them  still  remain,  however,  in  greater  or  less  force.  At 
the  restaurants,  in  the  shops  and  in  the  hotels  you  re 
ceive  your  change  in  "  hard  money  " — gold  and  silver 
coin.  Your  real  San  Franciscan  will  have  nothing  else. 
There  is  something  about  the  substantial  feeling  of  a 
coin,  something  about  the  tinkling  of  a  handful  of  it 
that  runs  straight  to  the  bottom  of  his  heart.  Since  the 
fire  —  which  worked  ever  more  fearful  havoc  with  San 
Francisco  comforts  than  with  the  physical  structure  of 
the  city  —  the  use  of  paper  money  has  increased.  But 
your  true  Californian  will  have  none  of  it.  When  he 
goes  east  and  they  give  him  paper  money  he  fusses  and 
fumes  about  it  —  inwardly  at  least.  He  thinks  that  it 
may  slip  out  of  that  pesky  inner  pocket  or  vest  or  coat. 
He  wants  gold  —  a  handful  of  it  in  his  trousers-pocket 
to  jingle  and  to  stay  put.  And  as  for  pennies.  You 
who  count  yourself  of  the  East  will  have  to  come  east 
once  again  before  you  pocket  such  copper  trash  —  they 
will  have  none  of  them  upon  the  West  Coast.  Small 
change  may  be  anything  else  but  it  is  not  western. 

"Western,"  did  we  say? 

Hold  on.  San  Francisco  is  not  western.  California 
is  not  western.  To  call  either  western  is  to  commit  an 
abomination  approaching  the  use  of  the  word  "  Frisco." 

"  California  is  to  all  purposes,  practical  and  social  — 
a  great  island,"  your  San  Franciscan  will  explain  to  you. 


SAN  FRANCISCO  295 

"  To  the  east  of  us  lies  another  dividing  sea  —  the  broad 
miles  of  desert  and  of  mountains,  and  so  broad  is  it  that 
Hong  Kong  or  Manila  or  Yokohama  seem  nearer  to  us 
than  Chicago  or  St.  Louis.  We  recognize  nothing  west 
of  New  York  and  Washington.  Between  is  that  vast 
space  —  the  real  West  —  which  fast  trains  and  good, 
bridge  in  a  little  more  than  four  days.  In  there  is  your 
West  —  Illinois,  Mississippi,  Iowa,  Nebraska,  Colorado 
—  all  the  rest  of  that  fine  family  of  American  states. 

"  In  Los  Angeles,  now,  it  is  different.  The  lady  that 
you  take  out  upon  your  arm  there  is  probably  from 
Davenport  or  Kokomo  or  Indianapolis,  whether  she  will 
admit  it  or  not.  Los  Angeles  is  western.  We  are  not. 
We  are  '  the  Coast '  and  be  exceeding  careful,  young 
man,  how  you  say  it." 

He  has  spoken  the  truth.  Your  typical  San  Francis 
can  is  quite  as  well  versed  in  the  streets  and  shops  and 
hotels  of  London,  Paris  and  Vienna,  as  your  typical  New 
Yorker  or  Bostonian.  The  four  days  bridging  across  the 
North  American  continent  is  no  more  to  him  than  the 
Hudson  river  ferries  to  the  commuter  from  New  Jersey. 
His  city  is  cosmopolitan  —  and  he  is  proud  of  it.  Her 
streets  are  cosmopolitan  and  so  are  her  shops  and  her 
I  great  hotels.  To  the  stately  Palace  reared  from  the  site 
of  the  old,  and  with  a  new  glass-covered  court  rivaling 
the  glories  of  its  predecessor,  still  come  princes  and  dip 
lomats,  globe-trotters  of  every  sort  and  bearing  in  their 
train  wondrous  luggage  of  every  sort,  prosperous  miners 
from  the  North,  bankers  from  the  East,  Californians 
from  every  corner  of  their  great  state,  and  look  with 
curious  interest  at  the  elect  of  San  Francisco  sipping 
their  high  tea  there  in  the  court  yard. 

And  the  cosmopolitanism  of  the  streets  is  still  more 
marked.  Portuguese,  Italian,  sour-doughs  from  Alaska, 
hundreds  of  the  little  brown  Japs  who  are  giving  Cali 
fornia  such  a  tremendous  worry  these  days,  Indians, 


296     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

French  Kanakas,  Mexicans,  Chinese  —  the  list  might 
be  run  almost  interminably.  Of  these  none  are  more  in 
teresting  than  the  Chinese.  You  see  them  in  all  the 
downtown  quarters  of  San  Francisco  —  the  men  with  that 
inscrutable  gravity  and  sagacity  that  long  centuries  of 
civilization  seem  to  have  given  them,  the  women  and 
the  little  girls,  of  high  caste  or  low,  invariably  hatless 
and  wearing  loose  coat  and  trousers  —  in  many  cases  of 
brilliant  colors  and  rare  Oriental  silks.  And  when  you 
come  to  their  own  city  within  a  city  —  San  Francisco's 
famous  Chinatown  —  they  are  the  dominant  folk  upon 
the  street.  Of  course  the  new  Chinatown  is  not  the 
old  —  with  its  subterranean  labyrinths  of  unspeakable 
vileness  and  dirt,  with  danger  and  crime  lurking  in  each 
of  its  dark  corners.  That  passed  completely  in  the  fire. 
But  it  had  begun  to  pass  even  before  that  great  calamity. 
It  was  being  exploited.  Paid  guides,  with  a  keen  sense 
of  the  theatrical,  were  beginning  to  work  the  damage. 
The  "  rubberneck  wagons  "  were  multiplying. 

Today  Chinatown  is  frankly  commercial.  It  is  clean 
and  new  and  clever.  Architects  have  brought  more  of 
the  Chinese  spirit  into  its  buildings  than  the  old  ever  had. 
It  does  not  lack  color  —  by  day,  the  treasures  of  its  shops, 
the  queer  folk  who  walk  its  streets,  even  the  bright  red 
placards  upon  the  door-lintels;  by  night  the  close  slow- 
moving  throngs  through  Grant  avenue  —  its  chief 
thoroughfare  —  the  swinging  lanterns  above  their  heads, 
the  radiance  that  comes  out  from  brilliantly  lighted  and 
mysterious  rooms  along  the  way  —  the  new  Chinatown 
of  San  Francisco.  But  it  is  now  frankly  commercial. 
The  paid  guides  and  the  "  rubberneck  wagons "  have 
completed  the  ruin.  If  you  are  taken  into  an  opium  den, 
you  may  be  fairly  sure  that  the  entire  performance  has 
been  staged  for  the  delectation  of  you  and  yours.  For 
the  real  secrets  even  of  the  new  Chinatown  are  not 
shown  to  the  unappreciative  eyes  of  white  folk. 


SAN  FRANCISCO  297 

At  the  edge  of  Chinatown  slopes  Portsmouth  square 
and  here  the  cosmopolitanism  of  San  Francisco  reaches 
its  high  apex.  Around  it  chatters  the  babel  of  all  tongues, 
beyond  it  stretches  the  "  Barbary  Coast,"*  that  col 
lection  of  vile,  if  picturesque  resorts  that  possesses  a 
tremendous  fascination  for  some  San  Franciscans  and 
some  tourists  but  which  has  no  place  within  the  covers 
of  this  book.  To  Portsmouth  square  come  the  repre 
sentatives  of  all  these  little  colonies  of  babbling  for 
eigners,  the  men  who  sail  the  seven  seas  —  the  flotsam 
and  the  jetsam  not  alone  of  the  Orient  but  of  the  whole 
wide  world  as  well.  There  is  a  little  man  who  sits  on 
one  side  of  the  square  and  who  for  a  very  small  sum  will 
execute  cubist  art  upon  your  cuticle.  Among  tattooers  he 
acknowledges  but  two  superiors  —  a  one-legged  veteran 
who  plies  his  trade  near  the  wharves  of  the  Mersey,  and 
a  Hindu  artist  at  Calcutta.  The  little  shops  that  line 
Portsmouth  square  are  the  little  shops  of  many  peo 
ples.  Over  their  counters  you  can  buy  many  things  prac 
tical,  and  many,  many  more  of  the  most  impractical  things 
in  all  the  world.  And  the  new  Hall  of  Justice  rises  above 
the  square  in  the  precise  site  of  the  old. 

Portsmouth  square  has  played  its  part  in  the  history 
of  San  Francisco.  From  it  the  modern  city  dates.  It 
was  the  plaza  of  the  old  Spanish  town,  and  within  this 
plaza  Commodore  Montgomery  of  the  American  sloop- 
of-war  Portsmouth  first  raised  the  Stars  and  Stripes 
—  in  the  strenuous  days  of  the  Mexican  war.  After 
that  the  stirring  days  of  gold-times  with  the  vigilantes 
conducting  hangings  on  the  flat  roofs  of  the  neighboring 
houses  of  adobe.  Portsmouth  square  indeed  has  played 
its  part  in  the  history  of  San  Francisco. 

"  Portsmouth  square,"  you  begin  to  say,  "  Portsmouth 

*As  this  goes  to  press  a  "vice  crusade"  has  swept  San 
Francisco  and  the  "  Barbary  Coast "  has  been  forced  to  close  its 
doors.  It  is  not  unlikely  that  they  may  be  opened  once  again. 

E.  H. 


298     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

square  —  was   it   not    Portsmouth   square   that    Steven 
son—-" 

Precisely  so.  There  are  still  some  of  the  shop-keepers 
about  that  ancient  plaza  who  can  recall  the  thin  figure 
of  the  poet  and  dreamer  who  loafed  lazy  days  in  that 
open  space  —  hobnobbing  with  sailors  and  the  strange 
dark-skinned  vagabond  folk  from  overseas.  There  is  a 
single  monument  in  the  square  today  —  a  smooth  mono 
lith  upon  whose  top  there  rests  a  ship,  its  sails  full-bellied 
to  the  wind  but  which  never  reaches  a  port.  Upon  the 
smooth  surface  of  that  stone  you  may  read : 

TO  REMEMBER 

ROBERT  LOUIS 

STEVENSON 

To  be  honest    To  be 
kind —    To  earn  a  lit 
tle    To  spend  a  lit 
tle  less  —  to  make 
upon  the  whole  a 
family  happier  for 
his  presence —    To  re 
nounce  when  that  shall 
be  necessary  and  not 
be  embittered —    To 
keep  a  few  friends  but 
these  without  capitula 
tion —    Above  all  on 
the  same  grim  condi 
tion  to  keep  friends 
with  himself —    Here  is 
a  task  for  all  that  a 
man  has  of  fortitude 
and  delicacy 

That  is  the  lesson  that  Portsmouth  square  gives  to  the 
wanderers  who  drag  themselves  today  to  its  benches  — 
the  words  that  come  as  a  sermon  from  one  who  knew 
and  who  pitied  wrecked  humanity. 

There  are  other  great   squares   of   San   Francisco  — 


SAN  FRANCISCO  299 

and  filled  with  interest  —  perhaps  none  other  more  so 
than  Union  square,  in  the  heart  of  the  fine  retail  section 
with  its  theaters  and  hotels  and  clubs.  Of  these  last 
there  is  none  more  famous  than  the  Bohemian.  More 
showy  clubs  has  San  Francisco.  The  Pacific  Union  in  its 
great  brown-stone  house  upon  the  very  crest  of  Nob  Hill, 
where  in  other  days  the  bonanza  millionaires  were  wont 
to  build  their  high  houses  so  that  they  might  look  across 
the  housetops  and  see  the  highways  in  from  the  sea,  has 
a  home  unsurpassed  by  any  other  in  the  whole  land. 
But  the  Bohemian  does  not  get  its  fame  from  its  fine 
town  club-house.  Its  "  jjnjss  "  held  in  August  in  a  great 
cluster  of  giant  redwood  trees  off  in  the  wonderful  Cali 
fornia  hills  are  world-renowned.  In  the  old  days  all 
that  was  necessary  for  a  man  to  be  a  Bohemian,  beyond 
the  prime  requisite  of  being  a  good  fellow,  was  that  he 
be  able  to  sing  a  song,  to  tell  a  story  or  to  write  a  verse. 
In  these  days  the  Bohemian  Club,  like  many  other  insti 
tutions  that  were  simple  in  the  beginning,  has  waxed  pros 
perous.  Some  of  its  members  have  rather  elaborate  cot 
tages  in  among  the  redwoods  and  go  back  and  forth  in 
automobiles.  But  much  of  the  old  spirit  remains.  It 
is  the  spirit  which  the  San  Franciscan  tells  you  gave 
first  American  recognition  to  such  an  artist  as  Luisa  Tet- 
razzini,  which  many  years  ago  gave  such  a  welcome  to 
the  then  famous  Lotta  that  the  generous  actress  in  a  burst 
of  generous  enthusiasm  returned  with  the  gift  to  the 
city  of  the  Lotta  fountain  —  at  one  of  the  most  famous 
of  the  Market  street  corners.  It  is  the  spirit  which 
makes  San  Francisco  give  to  art  or  literature  the  quickest 
appreciation  of  any  city  in  America.  It  is,  in  fact,  the 
same  spirit  that  gives  to  San  Francisco  the  reputation  of 
having  the  gayest  night  life  of  any  city  in  the  world  — 
with  the  possible  exception  of  Paris. 

Night  life  in  a  city  means  the  intoxication  of  many 
lights,  the  creature  comfort  of  good  restaurants.     San 


300     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Francisco  does  not  lack  either.  When  the  last  glimmer 
of  day  has  disappeared  out  over  the  Golden  Gate,  Mar 
ket  street,  Powell  street,  all  the  highways  and  the  byways 
that  lead  into  them  are  ablaze  with  the  incandescent 
glories  of  electricity.  Commerce  and  the  city's  lighting 
boards  vie  with  one  another  in  the  splendor  of  their  offer 
ings. 

And  as  for  the  restaurants  —  San  Francisco  boasts  of 
twelve  hundred  hotels,  alone.  Each  hotel  has  presuma 
bly  at  least  one  restaurant.  And  some  of  the  finest  of 
the  eating-places  of  the  city  at  the  Golden  Gate  are 
solely  restaurants.  As  a  matter  of  real  fact,  San  Fran 
cisco  is  the  greatest  restaurant  city  on  the  continent  — 
in  proportion  to  her  population  even  greater  than  New 
York.  In  New  York  and  more  recently  in  Chicago  the 
so-called  "  kitchenette  apartment "  has  come  into  great 
vogue  among  tiny  folks  —  two  or  three  rooms,  a  bath  and 
a  very  slightly  enlarged  clothes-press  in  which  a  small 
gas  or  electric  stove,  a  sink  and  a  refrigerator  suffices  for 
the  preparation  of  light  breakfasts  and  lunches.  Din 
ners  are  taken  out.  In  San  Francisco  the  "  kitchenettes  " 
are  omitted  in  thousands  of  apartments.  All  the  meals 
are  eaten  in  public  dining-rooms  and  the  restaurants 
thrive  wonderfully.  The  soft  climate  does  much  to  make 
this  possible. 

Living  in  these  new  apartments  of  San  Francisco  is  a 
comparatively  simple  matter.  Your  capital  investment 
for  house-keeping  may  be  small.  A  few  chairs,  a  table 
or  two,  some  linen  —  you  are  ready  to  begin. 

Beds? 

Bless  your  soul,  the  builder  of  the  apartment  house 
solved  that  problem  for  you.  Your  bed  is  a  master 
piece  of  architecture  which  lets  down  from  the  wall, 
a  la  Pullman.  By  day  it  goes  up  against  the  wall  again 
and  an  ingenious  arrangement  of  wall-shutters  enables 
the  bedding  to  air  throughout  the  entire  day.  In  some 


SAN  FRANCISCO  301 

cases  the  beds  will  let  down  either  within,  or  without, 
to  a  sleeping-porch,  for  your  real  San  Franciscan  has  a 
healthy  sort  of  an  animal  love  for  living  and  sleeping 
in  the  open.  The  glories  of  the  open  California  country 
that  lie  within  an  hour  or  two  of  the  city  tempt  him  into 
it  each  month  of  the  year,  and  he  is  impeccable  in  his 
horseback  riding,  his  fishing  and  his  shooting. 

To  return  to  the  restaurants  —  a  decided  contrast  to 
that  rough  life  in  the  open  which  he  really  loves  —  here 
is  one,  quite  typical  of  the  city.  It  is  gay,  almost  garish 
with  color  and  with  light.  Its  cabaret  almost  amounts 
to  an  operatic  performance  and  its  proprietor  will  tell 
you  with  no  little  pride  that  he  was  presenting  this  form 
of  restaurant  entertainment  long  months  before  the  idea 
ever  reached  New  York.  He  will  also  tell  you  that  he 
changes  the  entire  scheme  of  decoration  each  three 
months  —  the  San  Franciscan  mind  is  as  volatile  as  it 
is  appreciative. 

Little  Jap  girls  pass  through  the  crowded  tables  bring 
ing  you  hot  tea  biscuits  of  a  most  delicious  sort.  Other 
girls,  this  time  in  Neapolitan  dress,  are  distributing 
flowers.  The  head-waiter  bends  over  you  and  suggests 
the  salad  with  which  you  start  your  dinner,  for  it  seems 
to  be  the  fashion  in  San  Francisco  restaurants  to  eat 
your  salad  before  your  soup.  The  restaurant  is  a  gay 
place,  crowded.  Late-comers  must  find  their  way  else 
where.  And  the  food  is  surprisingly  good. 

But  we  best  remember  a  little  restaurant  just  back  of 
the  California  market  in  Pine  street  —  into  which  we 
stumbled  of  a  Saturday  night  just  about  dinner-time.  It 
was  an  unpretentious  place,  with  two  musicians  fiddling 
for  dear  life  in  a  tiny  balcony.  But  the  table  d'hote  — 
price  one  dollar,  with  a  bottle  of  California  wine  after 
the  fashion  of  all  San  Francisco  table  d'hotes —  was 
perfection,  the  special  dishes  which  the  waiter  suggested 
even  finer.  Soupe  I'oignon  that  might  linger  in  the 


•i 


302     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

mind  for  a  long  time,  a  marvelous  combination  salad, 
chicken  bonne  femme  —  which  translated  meant  a 
chicken  pulled  apart,  then  cooked  with  artichokes  in  a 
casserole,  the  whole  smothered  with  a  wonderful  brown 
gravy  —  there  was  a  dinner,  absolute  in  its  simplicity 
yet  leaving  nothing  whatsoever  to  be  wished.  And  a 
long  time  later  we  read  that  Maurice  Baring,  author  and 
globe-trotter,  had  visited  the  place  and  pronounced  its 
cookery  the  finest  that  he  had  ever  tasted. 

There  are  dozens  of  such  little  places  in  San  Francisco 
—  named  after  the  fashion  of  its  shops  in  grotesque  or 
poetic  fashion  —  and  they  are  almost  all  of  them  good. 
There  is  little  excuse  for  anything  else  in  a  town  whose 
very  cosmopolitanism  proclaims  real  cooks  in  the  making, 
whose  wharves  are  rubbed  by  smack  and  schooner  bring 
ing  in  the  food  treasures  of  the  sea,  whose  farms  are  vast 
truck  gardens  for  the  land,  whose  markets  run  riot  in 
the  richest  of  edibles.  Your  San  Franciscan  is  nothing 
if  not  an  epicure.  It  is  hardly  fair,  however,  to  assume 
that  he  is  a  glutton  or  that  he  merely  lives  to  eat.  For 
he  is,  in  reality,  so  very  much  more  —  optimistic, 
generous,  brave  —  and  how  he  does  delight  to  experi 
ment.  California  is  still  in  the  throes  of  what  seems  to 
be  a  social  and  political  earthquake,  with  each  shake 
growing  a  little  more  rough  than  its  predecessor.  She 
has  just  overturned  most  of  her  political  ideals  for  the 
first  fifty  years  of  her  life.  She  delights  in  politics.  , 
She  really  lives.  San  Francisco,  standing  between  those  ^ 
two  great  schools  of  thought,  the  University  of  Cali 
fornia  at  Berkeley,  and  Leland  Stanford  University  at 
Palo  Alto,  prides  herself  upon  her  growing  intellectuality. 
From  the  folk  who  dally  with  advanced  thought  of  every 
sort  down  to  those  who  are  merely  puzzled  and  dissatis 
fied,  the  population  of  this  Californian  metropolis  de 
mands  a  new  order  of  things.  That  as  much  as  anything 
else  explains  the  recent  political  revolutions.  Since  the 


The  Mission  Dolores— San  Francisco 


SAN  FRANCISCO  303 

great  fire,  the  plans  for  those  revolutions  have  been  under 
progress. 

The  mention  of  that  fire  —  if  you  make  any  pretense 
to  diplomacy  you  must  never  call  it  an  earthquake  around 
the  Golden  Gate  —  brings  us  back  to  the  San  Francisco 
of  today.  You  look  up  and  down  Market  street  for 
traces  of  that  fire  —  and  in  vain.  The  city  looks  modern, 
after  the  fashion  of  cities  of  the  American  west,  but  its 
buildings  do  not  seem  to  have  arisen  simultaneously 
after  the  scourge  that  leveled  them  —  simultaneously. 
But  turn  off  from  Market  street,  to  the  south  through 
Second  or  Third  streets  or  north  through  any  of  the 
parallel  throughfares  that  lead  out  of  that  same  main- 
stem  of  San  Francisco. 

Now  the  fullness  of  that  disaster  —  which  was  not 
more  to  you  at  the  time  than  the  brilliancy  of  news 
paper  dispatches  —  comes  home  to  you  for  the  first  time. 
In  the  rear  of  your  hotel  is  an  open  square  of  melan 
choly  ruins,  below  it  a  corner  plat  still  waste,  others  be 
yond  in  rapid  succession.  On  the  side  streets,  fragments 
of  "  party-walls,"  a  bit  of  crumbling  arch,  a  stout  stand 
ing  chimney  remind  you  of  the  San  Francisco  that  was 
and  that  can  never  be  again.  When  you  go  out  Market 
street,  you  may  see  where  stood  the  pretentious  City 
Hall  —  today  a  stretch  of  foundation-leveled  ruins  with 
a  single  surviving  dome  still  devoted  to  the  business  of 
the  Hall  of  Records.  Still,  to  get  the  fullness  of  the 
disaster  you  must  make  your  way  into  San  Fran 
cisco's  wonderful  Golden  Gate  Park,  past  the  single  | 
standing  marble  doorway  of  the  old  Towne  house  —  a 
pathetic  reminder  of  one  of  the  great  houses  of  the  old 
San  Francisco  —  and  straight  up  to  the  crest  of  the  high 
lifted  Strawberry  Hill.  On  that  hill  there  stood  until  the 
eighteenth  of  April,  1906,  a  solid  two-storied  stone  ob 
servatory.  It  seemed  to  be  placed  there  for  all  time,  but 
today  it  vaguely  suggests  the  Coliseum  of  Rome  —  a  half 


•-» 


304     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

circle  of  its  double  row  of  arches  still  standing  but  the 
weird  ruin  bringing  back  the  most  tragic  five  minutes  that 
an  American  city  has  ever  spent.  Or  if  you  will  go  a 
little  farther,  an  hour  on  a  quick-moving  suburban  train 
will  bring  you  to  Palo  Alto  and  the  remains  of  Leland 
Stanford  University,  that  remarkable  institution  whose 
museum  formerly  held  whole  cases  of  Mrs.  Stanford's 
gowns  and  a  papier-mache  reproduction  of  a  breakfast 
once  eaten  by  a  member  of  her  family. 

It  must  be  discouraging  to  try  to  bring  order  out  of 
the  chaos  that  was  wreaked  there.  The  great  library, 
which  was  wrecked  within  a  month  of  its  completion, 
and  the  gymnasium  have  never  been  rebuilt,  although 
the  dome  of  the  latter  is  still  held  aloft  on  stout  steel  sup 
ports.  The  chapel,  which  was  Mrs.  Stanford's  great 
pride  and  for  which  she  made  so  many  sacrifices  still 
rears  its  crossing.  Nave  and  transepts,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  marvelous  mosaics,  were  leveled  in  the  twinkling  of 
that  April  dawn.  The  long  vistas  of  arched  pergolas, 
the  triumph  of  the  master,  Richardson,  still  remain. 
And  the  ruin  done  in  that  catastrophe  to  the  high-sprung 
arch  he  placed  over  the  main  entrance  to  the  quadrangle 
has  been  in  part  eradicated. 

For  Leland  Stanford  University  today  represents  one 
of  the  bravest  attempts  ever  made  in  this  land  to  repair 
an  all  but  irreparable  loss.  It  has  never  lost  either  faith 
and  hope,  and  so  the  visitor  to  its  campus  today  will 
see  the  beginnings  toward  a  complete  replacement  of 
the  buildings  of  what  was  one  of  the  "  show  universi 
ties  "  of  the  land.  With  a  patience  that  must  have  been 
infinite,  the  stones  of  the  old  chapel  have  been  sorted  out 
of  the  ruin  —  even  fragments  of  the  intricate  mosaics 
have  been  carefully  saved  —  numbered  and  placed  in  se 
quence  for  re-erection.  Already  the  steel  frame  of  nave 
and  transepts  is  up  again  and  the  tedious  work  of  erect 
ing  the  masonry  walls  upon  it  begun.  Leland  Stanford 


SAN  FRANCISCO  305 

has,  quite  naturally,  caught  the  spirit  of  San  Francisco 
—  the  city  that  would  not  be  defeated. 

To  analyze  that  spirit  in  a  sweeping  paragraph  is  all 
but  impossible.  Incident  upon  incident  will  show  it  in 
all  its  phases.  For  instance,  there  was  in  San  Francisco 
on  the  morning  of  the  earthquake  a  sober-minded  Ger 
man  citizen  who  had  put  his  all  into  a  new  business  — 
a  business  that  had  just  begun  to  prove  the  wisdom  of 
his  investment.  When  Nature  awoke  from  her  long 
sleep  and  stretching  began  to  rock  the  city  by  the  Golden 
Gate  the  German  rushed  upstairs  to  where  his  wife  and 
daughter  slept.  He  found  them  in  one  another's  arms 
and  frantic  with  terror. 

"  Papa !  Papa !  "  they  shrieked.  "  We  are  going  to 
die.  It  is  the  end  of  the  world  —  the  business  is  gone. 
We  are  going  to  die !  " 

He  smiled  quietly  at  them. 

"  Well,  what  of  it?  "  he  asked  quietly.  "  We  die  to 
gether  —  and  in  San  Francisco." 

A  keen-witted  business  man  once  boasted  that  he  could 
capitalize  sentiment,  express  the  spirit  of  the  human  soul 
in  mere  dollars  and  cents.  What  price  could  he  give 
for  a  love  and  loyalty  of  that  sort?  That  was,  and  still 
is,  the  affection  that  every  San  Franciscan  from  the 
ferry-house  back  to  the  farthest  crest  of  the  uppermost 
hill  gives  to  his  city  —  it  is  the  thing  that  makes  her  one 
of  the  few  American  towns  that  possess  distinctive  per 
sonality. 

A  young  matron  told  us  of  her  own  experience  on  the 
morning  of  the  fire. 

"Of  course  it  was  exciting,"  she  said,  "  with  the  smoke 
rolling  up  upon  us  from  downtown,  and  the  rumors  re 
peating  themselves  that  the  disaster  was  world-wide,  that 
Chicago  was  in  ruins  and  New  York  swallowed  by  a 
tidal  wave,  but  there  was  nothing  unreal  about  a  single 
bit  of  it.  I  bundled  my  children  together  and  hurried 


306     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

toward  the  Presidio  —  my  knowledge  of  army  men  as 
sured  me  that  there  could  be  no  danger  there.  I  took 
the  little  tent  handed  me  and  set  up  my  crude  house-keep 
ing  in  it.  It  still  seemed  very  real  and  not  so  very  dif 
ficult. 

"  But  when  those  odd  little  newspapers  —  that  had 
been  printed  over  in  Oakland  —  came,  and  I  saw  the 
first  of  their  head-lines  '  San  Francisco  in  Ruins '  then 
it  came  upon  me  that  our  city,  my  city,  was  no  more,  and 
it  was  all  over.  It  was  all  the  most  unreal  thing  in  the 
world  and  I  cried  all  that  night,  not  for  a  single  loss 
beyond  that  of  the  San  Francisco  that  I  had  loved. 
But  the  next  morning  they  told  me  how  they  had  tele 
graphed  East  for  all  the  architects  in  sight,  and  that  morn 
ing  I  began  planning  a  new  house  just  as  if  it  had  been 
a  pet  idea  for  months  and  months  and  months.  .  .  ." 

Out  of  such  men  and  women  a  great  city  is  ever 
builded.  San  Francisco  may  be  wild  and  harum-scarum, 
and  a  great  deal  of  its  wildness  is  painfully  exaggerated, 
but  it  is  a  mighty  power  in  itself.  Your  San  Franciscan 
is  rightly  proud  of  the  progress  made  since  the  great  dis 
aster.  More  than  $375,000,000  —  a  sum  approximating 
the  cost  of  the  Panama  canal  —  has  already  been  spent 
in  rebuilding  the  city,  and  now,  like  a  man  who  has 
spent  his  last  dollar  on  a  final  substantial  meal,  the  west 
ern  metropolis  calls  for  cake  and  scrapes  up  an  additional 
$18,000,000  for  a  World's  Fair  "  to  beat  everything  that 
has  gone  before."  That  takes  financing  —  of  a  high  or 
der.  It  takes  something  more.  It  has  taken  a  real 
spirit  —  enthusiasm  and  love  and  courage  —  to  build  a 
new  San  Francisco  that  shall  gradually  obliterate  the 
poignant  memories  of  the  city  that  was. 


20 

BELFAST  IN  AMERICA 

CONCERNING  Toronto  it  may  be  said  that  she 
combines  in  a  somewhat  unusual  fashion  British 
conservatism  and  American  enterprise.  Her  neat  streets 
are  lined  with  solid  and  substantial  buildings  such  as  de 
light  the  heart  of  the  true  Briton  wherever  he  may  find 
them ;  and  yet  she  has  among  these  "  the  tallest  sky 
scraper  of  the  British  Empire,"  although  the  sixteen 
stories  of  its  altitude  would  be  laughed  to  scorn  by  many 
a  second-class  American  city. 

Still,  many  a  first-class  American  city  could  hardly 
afford  to  laugh  at  the  growth  of  Toronto,  particularly  in 
recent  years.  She  prides  herself  that  she  had  doubled 
her  population  each  fifteen  years  of  her  history  and  here 
is  a  geometrical  problem  of  growth  that  becomes  vastly 
more  difficult  with  each  oncoming  twelvemonth.  At  the 
close  of  the  second  war  of  the  United  States  with  Eng 
land,  just  a  century  ago,  Toronto  was  a  mere  hamlet. 
Beyond  it  was  an  unknown  wilderness.  The  town  was 
known  as  York  in  those  days,  and  although  Governor 
Simcoe  had  already  chosen  the  place  to  be  the  capital  of 
Upper  Canada,  it  was  a  struggling  little  place.  Still,  it 
must  have  struggled  manfully,  for  in  1817  it  was  granted 
self-government  and  in  1834,  having  garnered  in  some 
nine  thousand  permanent  residents,  it  was  vested  with 
a  Mayor  and  the  other  appurtenances  of  a  real  city. 
Since  then  it  has  grown  apace,  until  today  in  population 
and  in  financial  resource  it  is  very  close  upon  the  heels 
of  Montreal,  for  so  many  years  the  undisputed  metrop 
olis  of  the  Dominion. 

307 


3o8     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

But  perhaps  the  spur  that  has  advanced  Toronto  has 
been  the  knowledge  that  west  of  her  is  Winnipeg,  and 
that  Winnipeg  has  been  doubling  her  population  each 
decade.  And  west  of  Winnipeg  is  Calgary,  west  of  Cal 
gary,  Vancouver ;  all  growing  apace  until  it  is  a  rash  man 
who  today  can  prophesy  which  will  be  the  largest  city 
of  the  Dominion  of  Canada,  a  dozen  years  hence.  The 
Canadian  cities  have  certainly  been  growing  in  the  Amer 
ican  fashion  —  to  use  that  word  in  its  broadest  sense. 

And  yet  the  strangest  fact  of  all  is  that  Toronto  grows 
—  not  more  American,  but  more  British  year  by  year. 
Within  the  past  twelve  or  thirteen  years  this  has  become 
most  marked.  She  has  grown  from  a  Canadian  town, 
with  many  marked  American  characteristics,  into  a  town 
markedly  English  in  many,  many  ways.  Now  consider 
for  a  moment  the  whys  and  the  wherefores  of  this. 

We  have  already  told  of  the  rapid  progress  of  Toronto, 
now  what  of  the  folk  who  came  to  make  it?  In  the  be 
ginning  there  were  the  Loyalists  — "  Tories  "  we  call 
them  in  our  histories ;  "  United  Empire  Loyalists,"  as 
their  Canadian  descendants  prefer  to  know  them  —  who 
fled  from  the  Colonies  at  the  time  of  the  Revolution  and 
who  found  it  quite  impossible  to  return.  In  this  way 
some  of  the  old  English  names  of  Virginia  have  been 
perpetuated  in  Toronto,  and  you  may  find  in  one  of  the 
older  residential  sections,  a  great  house  known  as  Bev 
erly,  whose  doors,  whose  windows,  whose  fireplaces, 
whose  every  detail  are  exact  replicas  of  the  Beverly 
House  in  Virginia  which  said  good-by  to  its  proprietors 
a  century  and  a  half  ago. 

Those  Loyalists  laid  the  foundations  of  Toronto  of 
today.  The  municipality  of  Toronto  of  today  is,  as  you 
shall  see,  most  progressive  in  the  very  fibers  of  its  being, 
ranking  with  such  cities  as  Des  Moines  and  Cleveland 
and  Boston  as  among  the  best  governed  upon  the  North 
American  continent.  Such  civic  progress  was  not 


TORONTO  309 

drawn  from  the  cities  of  England  or  of  Scotland  or  of 
Ireland.  And  Toronto  was  a  well  organized  and  gov 
erned  municipality,  while  Glasgow  and  Manchester  were 
hardly  yet  emerging  from  an  almost  feudal  servility.  Be 
cause  in  Toronto  the  old  New  England  town-meeting  idea 
worked  to  its  logical  triumph.  The  Loyalists  who  had 
left  their  great  houses  of  Salem  and  of  Boston  brought 
more  to  the  wildernesses  of  Upper  Canada  than  merely 
fine  clothes  or  family  plate. 

To  this  social  foundation  of  the  town  came,  as  stock 
for  her  growth  through  the  remaining*three-quarters  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  the  folk  of  the  north  of  Ireland. 
The  southern  counties  of  the  Emerald  Island  gave  to 
America  and  gave  generously  —  to  New  York  and  to 
Boston ;  to  New  Brunswick  and  to  Lower  Canada.  The 
men  from  the  north  of  Ireland  went  to  Toronto  and  the 
nearby  cities  of  what  is  now  the  Province  of  Ontario. 
And  when  Toronto  became  a  real  city  they  began  to  call 
her  the  Belfast  of  America.  For  such  she  was.  She 
was  a  very  citadel  of  Protestantism.  Her  folk  trans 
planted,  found  that  they  would  worship  God  in  their 
austere  churches  without  having  the  reproachful  phrase 
of  "  dissenter  "  constantly  whipped  in  their  faces.  To 
ronto  meant  toleration.  So  came  the  Ulster  men  to  their 
new  Belfast.  For  more  than  sixty  years  they  came  —  a 
great  migrating  army.  And  if  you  would  know  the  way 
they  took  root  give  heed  to  a  single  illustration. 

One  of  these  Irishmen  had  founded  a  retail  store  in  the 
growing  little  city  of  Toronto.  It  thrived  —  tremen 
dously.  News  of  its  success  went  back  to  the  little  north- 
of-Ireland  village  from  whence  its  owner  came. 

"  Timothy  Eaton's  doin'  well  in  America,"  was  the  word 
that  passed  through  his  old  county.  Timothy  Eaton  and 
those  who  came  after  him  took  good  care  of  their  kith 
and  kin.  For  the  Eaton  business  did  prosper.  To 
day  the  firm  has  two  great  stores  —  one  in  Toronto  and 


310     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

one  in  Winnipeg  —  and  they  are  not  only  among  the 
largest  in  North  America  but  among  the  largest  in  the 
world. 

This  is  but  one  instance  of  the  way  that  Toronto  has 
grown.  And  when,  after  sixty  years  of  steady  immigra 
tion  there  was  little  of  kith  and  kin  left  to  come  from 
Ireland,  there  began  a  migration  from  the  other  side  of 
the  Irish  channel,  a  new  chapter  in  the  growth  of  Toronto 
was  opened. 

No  one  seems  to  know  just  how  the  tide  of  English 
emigration  starte(J,  but  it  is  a  fact  that  it  had  its  begin 
ning  about  the  time  of  the  end  of  the  Boer  war.  It  is 
no  less  a  fact  that  within  ten  or  fifteen  years  it  has  at 
tained  proportions  comparable  with  the  sixty  years  of 
Irish  immigration.  The  agents  of  the  Canadian  govern 
ment  and  of  her  railroads  have  shown  that  it  pays  to 
advertise. 

There  is  good  reason  for  this  immigration  —  of  course. 
Canada,  with  no  little  wisdom,  has  given  great  preference 
to  the  English  as  settlers.  She  has  not  wished  to  change 
her  religions,  her  language  or  her  customs.  The  English, 
in  turn,  have  responded  royally  to  the  invitation  to  come 
to  her  broad  acres  and  her  great  cities.  The  steamship 
piers,  at  Quebec  and  Montreal  in  the  summer  and  at  Hal 
ifax  and  St.  Johns  in  the  winter,  are  steadily  thronged 
with  the  newcomers,  and  they  do  not  speak  the  strange 
tongues  that  one  hears  at  Ellis  island  in  the  city  of 
New  York.  They  bring  no  strange  customs  or  strange 
religions  to  the  growing  young  nation  that  prides  herself 
upon  her  ability  to  combine  conservatism  and  progress. 

And  just  as  Toronto  once  did  her  part  in  depopulating 
the  north  of  Ireland,  so  today  is  the  Province  of  Ontario 
and  the  country  to  the  west  of  it  draining  old  England. 
It  is  related  that  one  little  English  village  —  Dove  Holes 
is  its  name  and  it  is  situate  in  Derbyshire  —  has  been 
sadly  depleted  in  just  this  fashion.  Eight  years  ago 


TORONTO  311 

and  it  boasted  a  population  of  1250  persons.  Today  500 
of  that  number  are  in  America  —  a  new  village  of  their 
own  right  in  the  city  of  Toronto,  if  you  please  —  and 
Dove  Holes  awaits  another  Goldsmith  to  sing  of  its 
saddened  charms.  One  resident  came,  the  others  fol 
lowed  in  his  trail  to  a  land  that  spelled  both  oppor 
tunity  and  elbow-room.  Your  real  Englishman  of  so- 
called  middle  class,  even  gentlemen  of  the  profes 
sion  or  service  in  His  Majesty's  arms,  seem  to  have 
one  consuming  passion.  It  is  to  cross  Canada  and  live 
and  die  in  the  little  West  Coast  city  gf  Victoria.  Vic 
toria  stands  on  Vancouver  island  and  they  have  begun  to 
call  Vancouver  island,  "  Little  England."  In  its  warm, 
moist  climate,  almost  in  its  very  conformation,  it  is  a 
replica  of  the  motherland  of  an  Englishman's  ideal ;  a 
motherland  with  everything  annoying,  from  hooliganism 
to  suffragettes,  removed. 

But  Victoria  is  across  a  broad  continent  as  well  as  a 
broad  sea,  and  so  your  thrifty  emigrant  from  an  English 
town  picks  Toronto  as  the  city  of  his  adoption.  Winni 
peg  he  deems  too  American;  Montreal,  with  her 
damnable  French  blood  showing  even  in  the  street-signs 
and  the  car-placards,  quite  out  of  the  question.  But 
Toronto  does  appeal  to  him  and  so  he  comes  straight  to 
her.  There  are  whole  sections  of  the  town  that  are  be 
ginning  to  look  as  if  they  might  have  been  stolen  from 
Birmingham  or  Manchester  or  Liverpool  —  even  London 
itself.  The  little  red-brick  houses  with  their  neat,  small 
windows  are  as  distinctively  British  as  the  capped  and 
aproned  house-maids  upon  the  street.  In  the  States  it 
takes  a  mighty  battle  to  make  a  maid  wear  uniform  upon 
the  street.  In  Toronto  it  is  not  even  a  question  for  argu 
ment.  The  negro  servant,  so  common  to  all  of  us,  is 
unknown.  The  service  of  the  better  grade  of  Toronto 
houses  is  today  carefully  fashioned  upon  the  British 
model  —  even  to  meal  hours  and  the  time-honored 


312     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

English  dishes  upon  the  table.  And  in  less  aristocratic 
streets  of  the  town  one  may  see  a  distinctively  British 
institution,  taken  root  and  apparently  come  to  stay.  It 
is  known  as  a  "  fish  and  chip  shop  "  and  it  retails  fried 
fish  and  potato  chips,  already  cooked  and  greasy  enough 
to  be  endearing  to  the  cockney  heart. 

Remember  also  that  the  city  upon  the  north  shore  of 
Lake  Ontario  is  an  industrial  center  of  great  importance. 
You  cannot  measure  the  tonnage  of  Toronto  harbor  as 
you  measured  the  harbor  of  Cleveland  —  alongside  of 
the  greatest  ports  of  the  world —  for  Ontario  is  the 
lonely  sister  of  the  five  Lakes.  No  busy  commercial 
fleet  treks  up  and  down  her  lanes.  But  Toronto  is  a 
railroad  center  of  increasing  importance;  they  are  still 
multiplying  the  lines  out  from  her  terminals  and,  as  we 
have  just  intimated,  she  is  a  great  and  growing  manu 
facturing  community.  Her  industrial  enterprises  have 
been  hungry  for  skilled  and  intelligent  men.  They  have 
gradually  drafted  their  ranks  from  the  less-paid  trades 
of  the  town.  Into  these  places  have  come  the  men  from 
the  English  towns.  The  street  cars  are  manned  by  men 
of  delightful  cockney  accent,  they  drive  the  broad  flat 
"  lourries,"  as  an  Englishman  likes  to  call  a  dray,  they 
fit  well  into  every  work  that  requires  brawn  and  endur 
ance  rather  than  a  high  degree  of  intellectual  effort. 

Just  how  this  invasion  will  affect  the  Toronto  of  to 
morrow  no  one  seems  willing  to  prophesy.  The  men 
from  Glasgow  and  from  Manchester  are  used  to  munic 
ipal  street  railroads  and  such  schemes  and  the  New 
England  town-meeting  ideas,  which  were  the  products 
of  Anglo-Saxon  spirit,  come  home  to  rest  in  English 
hearts.  The  street  railroad  system  of  Toronto  may 
groan  under  its  burden  —  it  is  paying  over  a  million  dol 
lars  this  year  to  the  city  and  is  constantly  threatened  with 
extinction  as  a  private  corporation.  But  the  Englishman 


TORONTO  313 

of  that  city  merely  grunts  at  the  bargains  it  offers  —  six 
tickets  for  a  quarter ;  eight  in  rush-hours,  ten  for  school 
children  and  seven  for  Sabbath  riding,  all  at  the  same 
price  —  and  wonders  "  why  the  nawsty  trams  canna'  do 
better  by  a  codger  that's  workin'  like  a  navvie  all  the 
day?" 

Toronto  will  see  that  they  do  better  —  that  is  her 
vision  into  the  future.  But  just  how  the  new  blood  is  to 
infuse  into  some  of  the  Puritan  ideas  of  the  town  — 
there  is  another  question.  Here  is  a  single  one  of  the 
new  puzzling  points  —  the  temperance  problem.  It  was 
not  so  very  long  ago  that  Canada's  chief  claim  for  fame 
rested  in  the  excellence  of  her  whiskey  —  and  that  des 
pite  the  fact  that  the  Canadian  climate  is  ill-adapted  to 
whiskey  drinking.  The  twelfth  of  July  —  which  you 
will  probably  recall  as  the  anniversary  of  the  battle  of 
the  Boyne  —  used  to  be  marked  by  famous  fights,  which 
invariably  had  marine  foundations  in  Canadian  rye. 
However,  during  the  past  quarter  of  a  century,  the  tem 
perance  movement  has  waxed  strong  throughout  On 
tario.  Many  cities  have  become  "  dry  "  and  it  is  pos 
sible  that  Toronto  herself  might  have  been  without  sa 
loons  today  —  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  English  invasion. 
For  your  Englishman  regards  his  beer  as  food  —  "  skittles 
and  beer  "  is  something  more  than  merely  proverbial  — 
and  he  must  have  it.  He  looks  complacently  upon  the 
stern  Sabbath  in  Toronto  —  Sunday  in  an  English  city 
is  rarely  a  hilarious  occasion  —  but  he  must  have  his 
beer.  Up  to  the  present  time  he  has  had  it. 

But  these  problems  are  slight  compared  with  the  prob 
lem  of  assimilation  of  alien  tongues  and  races,  such  as 
has  come  to  New  York  within  the  past  two  decades. 
The  Englishman  is  but  a  cousin  to  the  Canadian  after 
all,  and  he  shows  that  by  the  enthusiasm  with  which  he 
enters  into  her  politics.  He  entered  into  Mr.  Taft's 
pet  reciprocity  plan  with  an  enthusiasm  of  a  distinct 


314     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

sort.  With  all  of  his  anti-American  and  pro-British 
ideas  he  leaped  upon  it.  And  when  he  had  accomplished 
his  own  part  in  throttling  that  idea  he  exulted.  Whether 
he  will  exult  as  much  a  dozen  years  hence  over  the  de 
feat  of  reciprocity  is  an  open  question.  But  the  part  that 
the  transplanted  Englishman  in  Canada  played  in  that 
defeat  is  unquestioned,  just  as  the  part  he  is  playing  in 
providing  her  with  useless  Dreadnoughts  for  the  defense 
of  other  lands  is  undisputed.*  The  Englishman  is  no 
small  factor  in  Canadian  politics ;  he  is  a  very  great  fac 
tor  in  the  political  situation  in  the  city  of  Toronto. 

Lest  you  should  be  bored  by  the  politics  of  another 
land,  turn  your  attention  to  the  way  the  Toronto  peo 
ple  live.  They  have  formal  entertainments  a-plenty  — 
dinners,  balls,  receptions  —  a  great  new  castle  is  being 
built  on  the  edge  of  Rosedale  for  a  gubernatorial  resi 
dence  and  presumably  for  the  formal  housing  of  roy 
alty  which  often  comes  down  from  Ottawa.  There 
are  theaters  and  good  restaurants,  and  no  matter  what 
you  may  say  about  her  winters,  the  Canadian  summers 
are  delightful.  For  those  who  must  go,  there  are  the 
Muskoka  Lakes  within  easy  reach,  Georgian  bay  and  the 
untrod  wildernesses  beyond.  But  if  we  lived  in  Toronto, 
we  think  we  should  stay  at  home  and  enjoy  that  wonder 
ful  lake.  There  are  yacht-clubs  a-plenty  alongside  it, 
bathing  beaches,  sailing,  canoeing  —  the  opportunity  for 
variety  of  sport  is  wide.  In  the  milder  seasons  of  the 
year  there  is  golf  and  baseball,  football,  or  even  cricket, 
and  in  the  wintertime  tobogganing  and  snowshoeing  and 
iceboating.  No  wonder  that  the  cheeks  of  the  Toronto 
girls  are  pink  with  good  health. 

In  the  autumn  there  is  the  big  fair  —  officially  the 
Canadian  National  Exhibition  —  which  has  grown  from 
a  very  modest  beginning  into  a  real  institution.  Last 

*  This  plan  is  temporarily  blocked  in  Canada,  whose  enthusiasm 
for  Dreadnoughts  seems  to  be  waning.    E.  H. 


TORONTO  315 

year  nearly  a  million  persons  entered  its  gates,  there 
were  more  than  a  hundred  thousand  admissions  upon  a 
single  very  big  day.  Delegations  of  folk  came  from  as 
far  distant  as  Australia  —  there  were  special  excursion 
rates  from  all  but  three  of  the  United  States.  It  is  not 
only  a  big  fair  but  a  great  fair,  still  growing  larger  with 
each  annual  exhibition.  Toronto  folk  are  immensely 
proud  of  it  and  give  to  it  loyalty  and  support.  And  the 
Canadian  government  is  not  above  gaining  a  political 
opportunity  from  it.  We  remember  one  autumn  at  To 
ronto  three  or  four  years  ago  seeing  a  great  electric  sign 
poised  upon  one  of  the  main  buildings.  It  was  a  moving 
sign  and  the  genius  of  the  electrician  had  made  the  sem 
blance  of  a  waving  British  banner.  Underneath  in 
fixed  and  glowing  letters  you  might  read : 

ONE  FLAG,   ONE  KING,  ONE  NATION 

To  see  Toronto  as  a  British  city,  however,  you  must 
go  to  her  in  May  —  at  the  time  of  her  spring  races. 
The  fair  is  very  much  like  any  of  the  great  fairs  in  the 
United  States.  The  race-meet  is  distinctly  different. 
In  the  United  States  horse-racing  has  fallen  into  ill- 
repute,  and  most  of  the  famous  tracks  around  our  larger 
cities  have  been  cut  up  into  building  lots.  The  sport 
with  us  was  commercialized,  ruined,  and  then  practically 
forbidden.  In  Canada  they  have  been  wiser,  although 
the  tendency  to  make  the  sport  entirely  professional  and 
so  not  sport  at  all  has  begun  to  show  itself  even  over 
there.  But  in  Toronto  they  go  to  horse-races  for  the 
love  of  horse-racing,  and  not  in  the  hopes  of  making  a 
living  without  working  for  it. 

The  great  spring  race-meet  is  the  gallop  for  the  King's 
Guineas.  It  is  at  the  Woodbine  and  in  addition  to  being 
the  oldest  racing  fixture  in  America  it  is  also  just  such 
a  day  for  Canada  as  Derby  Day  is  for  England.  If  you 


316     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

go  to  Toronto  for  Plate  Day  —  as  they  call  that  great 
race-day  —  you  will  be  wise  to  have  your  hotel  accom 
modations  engaged  well  in  advance.  You  will  find  Plate 
Day  to  be  the  Saturday  before  the  twenty-fourth  of  May. 
And,  lest  you  should  have  forgotten  the  significance  of  the 
twenty-fourth  of  May,  permit  us  to  remind  you  that  for 
sixty-four  long  years  loyal  Canada  celebrated  that  day  as 
the  Queen's  birthday.  And  it  is  today,  perhaps,  the  most 
tender  tribute  that  the  Canadians  can  render  Victoria  — 
their  adherence  to  her  birthday  as  the  greatest  of  their  na 
tional  holidays. 

If  you  are  wise  and  wish  to  see  the  English  aspect  of 
Toronto,  you  will  reserve  your  accommodations  at  a  cer 
tain  old  hotel  near  the  lakefront  which  is  the  most  in 
tensely  British  thing  that  will  open  to  a  stranger  within 
the  town.  Within  its  dining-room  the  lion  and  the  uni 
corn  still  support  the  crown,  and  the  old  ladies  who  are 
ushered  to  their  seats  wear  white  caps  and  gently  pat 
their  flowing  black  skirts.  The  accents  of  the  employes 
are  wonderfully  British,  and  if  you  ask  for  pens  you 
will  surely  get  "  nibs."  The  old  house  has  an  air,  which 
the  English  would  spell  "  demeanour,"  and  incidentally 
it  has  a  wonderful  faculty  of  hospitality. 

From  it  you  will  drive  out  to  the  track,  and  if  you  elect 
you  can  find  seats  upon  a  tally-ho,  drawn  by  four  or 
six  horses,  properly  prancing,  just  as  they  prance  in  old 
sporting-prints.  Of  course,  there  are  ungainly  motor 
cars,  like  those  in  which  the  country  folk  explore  Broad 
way,  New  York,  but  you  will  surely  cling  to  the  tally-ho. 
And  if  your  tally-ho  be  halted  in  the  long  and  dusty  pro 
cession  to  the  track  to  let  a  coach  go  flying  by,  if  that 
coach  be  gay  in  gilt  and  color,  white-horsed,  postilioned, 
if  rumor  whispers  loudly,  "  It's  the  Connaughts  —  the 
Governor-General,  you  know,"  you  will  forget  for  that 
moment  your  socialistic  and  republican  ideas,  and  strain 


TORONTO  317 

your  old  eyes  for  a  single  fleeting  glimpse  of  bowing 
royalty. 

For  royalty  drives  to  Plate  Day  just  as  royalty  drives 
to  Ascot.  Its  box,  its  manners  and  its  footmen  are 
hardly  less  impressive.  And  in  the  train  of  royalty 
comes  the  best  of  Toronto,  not  the  worst.  Finely 
dressed  women,  jurists,  doctors,  bankers —  the  list  is 
a  long,  long  one.  And  in  their  train  in  turn  the  artisans. 
The  plumber  who  tinkers  with  the  pipes  in  your  hotel 
in  the  morning  has  a  dollar  up  on  the  "  plate,"  so  has  the 
porter  who  handles  your  trunk,  so  have  three-quarters 
of  the  trolley-car  men  of  the  town  —  and  yet  they  are 
not  gamblers.  The  "  tout "  who  used  to  be  a  disagree 
able  and  painfully  evident  feature  of  New  York  racing 
is  missing.  So  are  the  professional  gamblers,  the  betting 
being  on  the  pari-mutuel  system.  And  the  man  who 
loses  his  dollar  because  he  failed  to  pick  the  winning 
horse  feels  that  he  has  lost  it  in  a  patriotic  cause.  It 
should  be  worth  a  miserable  dollar  to  see  royalty  come  to 
the  races  in  a  coach. 

From  Toronto  we  will  go  to  her  staunch  French  rival, 
Montreal.  If  we  are  in  the  midsummer  season  we  may 
go  upon  a  very  comfortable  steamer,  down  the  lonely 
Ontario  and  through  the  beauties  of  the  Thousand  Is 
lands.  And  at  all  seasons  we  will  find  the  railroad  ride 
from  Toronto  filled  with  interest,  with  glimpses  of  lake 
and  river,  with  the  character  of  the  country  gradually 
changing,  the  severe  Protestant  churches  giving  way  to 
great  tin-roofed  Roman  churches,  holding  their  crosses 
on  high  and  gathering  around  their  gray- stone  walls  the 
houses  of  their  little  flocks. 


21 

WHERE  FRENCH  AND  ENGLISH  MEET 

OUR  hotel  faces  a  little  open  square  and  in  the 
springtime  of  the  year,  when  the  trees  are  barely 
budding,  we  can  still  see  the  sober  gray-stone  houses  on 
the  far  side  of  the  square,  each  with  its  brightly  colored 
green  blinds.  At  one  is  the  "  Dentiste,"  at  another  the 
"  Avocat,"  a  third  has  descended  to  a  pension  with  its 
"  Chamber  d'Louer."  There  are  shiny  brass  signs  on 
the  front  of  each  of  these  three  old  houses,  and  every 
morning  at  seven-thirty  o'clock  three  trim  little  French 
Canadian  maids  attack  the  signs  vigorously  with  their 
wiping  cloths.  Then  we  know  that  it  is  time  to  get  up. 
By  the  same  fashion  we  should  be  shaved  and  ready  for 
our  marmalade  and  bacon  and  eggs  as  the  regal  carrier 
of  the  King's  mail  trots  down  the  steps  of  the  French 
consulate  and  rings  at  the  area  door  of  the  neighboring 
"  Conservatoire  Musicale."  In  a  very  little  time  that  row 
of  houses  across  the  Place  Viger  Gardens  has  become  a 
factor  in  our  very  lives.  It  is  the  starting-point  of  our 
days. 

In  the  morning,  when  the  marmalade  and  the  bacon 
and  eggs  are  finished,  we  step  out  into  the  Gardens  for 
the  first  breath  of  crisp  fresh  air  of  the  north.  There 
is  a  line  of  wonderful  cabs  waiting  at  its  edge,  and  a 
prompt  driver  steps  forward  from  each  to  solicit  our 
patronage.  The  cab  system  of  Montreal  is  indeed 
wonderful  —  it  first  shows  to  the  stranger  within  that 
city's  gates  its  remarkable  continental  character.  For 
you  seemingly  can  ride  and  ride  and  ride  —  and  then 

318 


MONTREAL  319 

some  more  —  and  the  cabby  tips  his  hat  at  a  quarter  or 
a  half  a  dollar.  He  has  an  engaging  way  of  smiling 
at  you  at  the  end  of  the  trip,  and  leaving  it  to  you  as 
to  what  he  gets.  You  can  trust  to  the  Montreal  cabby's 
sense  of  fairness  and  he  seems  to  feel  that  he  can  trust 
to  yours.  But  that  is  not  all  quite  as  altruistic  as  it 
may  seem  at  first  glance.  Back  of  the  cabby's  smile  is 
the  unsmiling,  sober  sense  of  justice  always  existent  in 
a  British  city,  and  it  is  that  which  really  keeps  the  Mon 
treal  cab  service  as  efficient  as  it  really  is,  as  cheap  and 
as  accessible.  For  at  every  one  of  the  almost  innumerable 
open  squares  of  the  city,  are  the  cab-stands,  the  long  line 
of  patiently  waiting  carriages,  and  the  little  kiosk  from 
which  they  can  be  summoned.  It  is  all  quite  simple  and 
complete  and  an  ideal  toward  which  metropolitan  New 
York  may  be  aspiring  but  has  never  reached. 

On  sunny  mornings  we  scorn  the  cabs  and  stroll  across 
the  Gardens.  Sometimes  we  drop  for  a  moment  on  one 
of  the  clumsily  comfortable  benches  under  the  shade  of 
the  Canadian  maples,  and  glance  at  the  morning  paper  — 
a  ponderous  sheet  much  given  to  the  news  of  Ottawa 
and  London,  discoursing  upon  the  work  of  two  Parlia 
ments,  but  only  granting  grudging  paragraphs  to  the 
news  of  a  home-land,  scarce  sixty  miles  distant.  That  is 
British  policy,  the  straining  policy  of  trying  to  make  a 
unified  nation  of  lands  separated  from  one  another  by 
broad  seas.  That  England  has  done  it  so  well  is  the 
marvel  of  strangers  who  enter  her  dominions.  Mon 
treal  is  loyal  to  her  mother  land,  despite  some  local  in 
fluences  which  we  shall  see  in  a  moment.  A  surprising 
number  of  her  citizens  go  back  and  forth  to  the  little 
island  that  governs  her,  once  or  twice  or  three  times  a 
year.  There  are  thousands  of  business  men  in  the  me 
tropolis  of  Canada  who  know  Pall  Mall  or  Piccadilly  far 
more  intimately  than  either  Wall  street  or  Times  square 


320     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

—  and  New  York  is  but  a  night's  ride  from  Montreal. 
So  much  can  carefully  directed  sentiment  accomplish. 

The  paths  that  lead  from  the  Gardens  are  varied  and 
fascinating.  One  stretches  up  a  broad  and  sober  street 
to  Ste.  Catherine's,  the  great  shopping  promenade  of  the 
town,  where  the  girls  are  all  bound  west  toward  the  big 
shops  that  stretch  from  Phillips  to  Dominion  squares 

—  another  at  the  opposite  direction  three  blocks  to  the 
south  and  the  harbor-front,  a  wonderful  place  now  in  a 
chaos  of  transformation  that  is  going  to  make  Montreal 
the  most  efficient  port  in  the  world.     We  can  remember 
the  water-front  of  the  old  town  as  it  first  confronted  us 
a  quarter  of  a  century  ago,  after  a  long  all-day  trip  down 
the  rapids  of  the  upper  St.  Lawrence  —  back  of  the  gay 
shipping  a  long  stretch  of  sober  gray  limestone  build 
ings,   accented  by   numerous   domes,   the  joy  of   every 
British  architect,  the  long  straight  front  of  Bonsecours 
market,    the    little    spire    of    Bonsecours    church,    and 
the    two    great    towers    of    Notre    Dame    rising    above 
it  all.     There  was   a  curving  wall  of  stone  along  the 
quay  street  and  it  all  seemed  quite  like  the  geography 
pictures   of   Liverpool,   or  was   it   Marseilles? 

Nowadays  that  quiet  prospect  is  gone.  A  great  water 
side  elevator  of  concrete  rises  almost  two  hundred  and 
fifty  feet  into  the  air  from  the  quay  street;  there  are 
other  elevators  nearly  as  large  and  nearly  as  sky-scrap 
ing,  a  variety  of  grim  and  covered  piers  and  the  man 
from  a  boat  amidstream  hardly  catches  even  a  glimpse 
of  Notre  Dame  or  Bonsecours.  And  Montreal  gave 
up  her  glimpses  of  the  river  that  she  loves  so  passion 
ately,  not  without  a  note  of  regret ;  the  market-men  gently 
protested  that  they  could  no  longer  sit  on  the  portico 
of  the  Bonsecours  and  see  the  brisk  activity  of  the  har 
bor.  But  Montreal  realizes  the  importance  of  her  har 
bor  to  her.  She  is  a  thousand  miles  inland  from  "blue 
water "  and  for  five  months  of  the  year  her  great 


MONTREAL  321 

strength  giving  river  is  tightly  frozen;  despite  these  ob 
stacles  she  has  come  within  the  past  year  to  be  the  most 
efficient  port  in  the  world,  and  among  twelve  or  four 
teen  of  the  greatest.  And  commercial  power  is  a  laurel 
branch  to  any  British  city. 

There  are  other  paths  that  lead  from  Place  Viger  Gar 
dens  —  that  lead  on  and  on  and  to  no  place  in  particular, 
but  all  of  them  are  filled  with  constant  interest.  The 
side  streets  of  Montreal  are  fascinating.  Their  newer 
architecture  is  apt  to  be  fantastic,  ofttimes  incongruous, 
but  there  are  still  many  graystone  houses  in  that  simple 
British  style  that  is  still  found  throughout  the  older  Can 
ada,  all  the  way  from  Halifax  to  the  Detroit  river. 
There  are  the  inevitable  maple  trees  along  the  curbs  that 
make  Montreal  more  of  a  garden  city  than  unobservant 
travelers  are  apt  to  fancy  it.  And  then  there  are  the 
institutions,  wide-spreading  and  many-winged  fellows, 
crowned  with  the  inevitable  domes  and  shielded  from  the 
vulgarity  of  street  traffic  by  high-capped  walls.  These 
walls  are  distinctive  of  Montreal.  Often  uncompromis 
ing,  save  where  some  gentle  vine  runs  riot  upon  their 
lintels  and  laughs  at  their  austerity,  they  are  broken  here 
and  there  and  again  by  tightly  shut  doors,  doors  that 
open  only  to  give  forth  on  rare  occasions ;  to  let  a  som 
ber  file  of  nuns  or  double  one  of  cheaply  uniformed 
children  pass  out  into  a  sordid  and  sin-filled  world,  and 
then  close  quickly  once  again  lest  some  of  its  contamina 
tions  might  penetrate  the  gentle  and  unworldly  place. 
And  near  these  great  institutions  are  the  inevitable 
churches,  giant  affairs  —  parish  churches  still  dominating 
the  sky-line  of  a  town  which  is  just  now  beginning  to 
dabble  in  American  skyscrapers,  and  standing  ever 
watchful,  like  a  mother  hen  brooding  and  protecting  her 
chicks.  These  chance  paths  often  lead  to  other  squares 
than  the  Gardens  of  the  Place  Viger  —  squares  which  in 
spring  and  in  summer  are  bright  green  carpets  spread 


322      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

in  little  open  places  in  the  heart  and  length  and  breadth 
of  the  city,  and  which  are  surrounded  by  more  of  the 
solid  graystone  houses  with  the  green  blinds.  When  we 
go  from  Montreal  we  shall  remember  it  as  a  symphony 
of  gray  and  green  —  remember  it  thus  forever  and  a 
day. 

But  best  of  all  we  like  the  path  that  leads  from  the 
Place  Viger  west  through  the  very  heart  of  the  old  city 
and  then  by  strange  zig-zags,  through  the  banking  cen 
ter,  Victoria  square,  Beaver  Hall  Hill  and  smart  Ste. 
Catherine's  to  Dominion  square  and  the  inevitable  after 
noon  tea  of  the  British  end  of  the  town.  We  turn  from 
our  hotel  and  the  great  new  railroad  terminal  that  it 
shelters,  twist  through  a  narrow  street  —  picturesquely 
named  the  Champ  d'Mars  —  and  follow  it  to  the  plain 
and  big  City  Hall  and  Court  House.  They  are  uninter 
esting  to  us,  but  across  the  busy  way  of  Notre  Dame  street 
stands  the  Chateau  de  Ramezay,  a  long,  low,  white 
washed  building,  which  has  had  its  part  in  the  making  of 
Montreal.  This  stoutly  built  old  house  was  built  in  1705 
by  Claude  de  Ramezay,  Governor  of  Montreal,  and  was 
occupied  by  him  for  twenty  years  while  he  planned  his 
campaigns  against  both  English  and  Indians.  Then  for 
a  time  it  was  the  headquarters  of  the  India  company's 
trade  in  furs,  and  for  a  far  longer  time  after  1759  the 
home  of  a  succession  of  British  governors.  Americans 
find  their  keenest  interest  in  the  Chateau  de  Ramezay, 
in  the  fact  that  it  was  in  its  long  rambling  low-ceilinged 
rooms  that  Benjamin  Franklin  set  up  his  printing-press, 
away  back  during  the  days  of  the  first  unpleasantness 
between  England  and  this  country.  After  that,  all  was 
history,  the  Chateau  was  again  the  Government  House 
of  the  old  Canada  —  until  Ottawa  and  the  new  Domin 
ion  came  into  existence.  Nowadays,  it  faces  one  of  the 
busiest  streets  of  a  busy  city  —  and  is  not  of  it.  It  is 
like  a  sleeping  man  by  the  roadside,  who,  if  he  might 


MONTREAL  323 

awake  once  more,  could  spin  at  length  the  romances  of 
other  days  and  other  men. 

Beyond  the  Chateau  de  Ramezay  is  a  broad  and  open 
market  street  that  stretches  from  the  inevitable  Nelson 
monument,  that  is  part  and  pride  of  every  considerable 
British  city,  down  to  that  same  water-front,  just  now  in 
process  of  transformation.  Sometimes  on  a  Tuesday  or 
a  Friday  morning  we  have  come  to  the  place  early  enough 
to  see  the  open-air  market  of  Montreal,  one  of  the  heri 
tages  of  past  to  present  that  seems  little  disturbed  with 
the  coming  and  the  passing  of  the  years.  Shrewd  shop 
pers  coming  out  of  the  solid  stone  mass  of  the  Bonsecours 
pause  beside  the  wagons  that  are  backed  along  the  broad- 
flagged  sidewalks.  The  country  roundabout  Montreal 
must  be  filled  with  fat  farms.  One  look  at  the  wagons 
tells  of  low  moist  acres  that  have  not  yet  lost  their  fer 
tility.  And  sometimes  the  market  women  bring  to  the 
open  square  hats  of  their  own  crude  weaving,  or  little 
carved  crosses,  or  even  bunches  of  delicate  wild-flowers 
and  sell  them  for  the  big  round  Canadian  pennies. 
There  is  hardly  any  barterable  article  too  humble  for  this 
market-place,  and  with  it  all  the  clatter  of  small  sharp 
pleasant  talk  between  a  race  of  small,  sharp,  pleasant 
folk. 

From  the  market-place  leading  out  from  before  the 
ugly  City  Hall  and  the  uninteresting  Court  House,  our 
best  walk  leads  west  through  Notre  Dame  street  up  to 
the  nearby  Place  d'Armes.  It  is  a  very  old  street  of 
a  very  old  city  and  even  if  the  history  of  the  town  did 
not  tell  us  that  some  of  the  old  houses,  staunch  fellows 
every  one  of  them,  high-roofed  and  dormered,  with  their 
graystone  walls  four  and  five  feet  thick  and  as  rough  and 
rugged  as  the  times  for  which  they  were  built,  would 
convince  us,  of  themselves.  They  are  fast  going,  these 
old  fellows,  for  Montreal  has  entered  upon  boom  times 
with  the  multiplication  of  transcontinental  railroads 


324     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

across  Canada.  But  it  seems  but  yesterday  that  they 
could  point  to  us  in  the  Place  d'Armes  the  very  house 
in  which  lived  LaMothe  Cadillac,  the  founder  of  De 
troit,  nearby  the  house  of  Sieur  Duluth.  Montreal 
seems  almost  to  have  been  the  mother  of  a  continent. 

It  is  in  this  Place  d'Armes,  this  tiny  crowded  square 
in  the  center  of  the  modern  city,  hardly  larger  than  the 
garden  of  a  very  modest  house  indeed,  that  so  many  of 
the  romantic  memories  of  the  old  Montreal  cluster.  With 
the  great  church  that  has  thrust  its  giant  shadow  across 
it  for  more  than  three  quarters  of  a  century,  the  Place 
d'Armes  has  been  the  heart  of  Montreal  since  the  days 
when  it  was  a  mere  trading  post,  a  collection  of  huts  at 
the  foot  of  the  lowest  rapids  of  the  mighty  river.  Much 
of  the  old  Montreal  has  gone,  even  the  citadel  at  the  west 
end  of  the  town  gave  way  years  ago  to  Dalhousie  square, 
which  in  turn  gave  way  to  the  railroad  yards  of  the 
Place  Viger  terminals.  But  the  Place  d'Armes  will  re 
main  as  long  as  the  city  remains. 

At  its  northwest  corner  is  the  colonnaded  front  of  the 
Bank  of  Montreal,  one  of  the  finest  banking-homes  in 
Canada. 

"  It  is  the  great  institution  of  this  British  Dominion," 
says  a  very  old  Canadian,  whom  we  sometimes  meet  in 
the  little  square.  "  It  is  the  greatest  bank  in  North 
America." 

Offhand,  we  do  not  know  as  to  the  exact  truth  of  that 
sweeping  statement,  but  it  is  a  certain  fact  that  the  Bank 
of  Montreal  is  the  greatest  bank  in  all  Canada,  one  of 
the  greatest  in  the  world,  with  its  branches  and  rami 
fications  extending  not  only  across  a  continent  four 
thousand  miles  in  width  but  also  over  two  broad  seas. 
To  Montreal  it  stands  as  that  famous  "  old  lady  of 
Threadneedle  street "  stands  to  London. 

"  And  yet,"   our   Canadian   friend   continues,   "  right 


MONTREAL 

across  the  Place  d'Armes  here  is  an  institution  that 
could  buy  and  sell  the  Bank  of  Montreal  —  or  better 
still,  buy  it  and  keep  it." 

Our  eyes  follow  his  pointing  hand  —  to  a  long,  low 
building  on  the  south  side  of  the  little  square.  It  is 
very  old  and  exceeding  quaint.  Although  built  of  the 
graystone  of  Montreal,  brought  by  the  soot  of  many  years 
to  almost  a  dead  black,  it  seems  of  another  land  as  well 
as  of  another  time.  Its  quaint  belfry  with  delicate  clock- 
face  and  out-set  hands  is  redolent  of  the  south  of  France 
or  Spain  or  even  Italy.  It  does  not  seem  a  part  and 
parcel  of  Our  Lady  of  the  Snows  —  and  yet  it  is. 

"  You  know  —  the  Seminary  of  St.  Sulpice,"  says  our 
Canadian  friend.  "  It  was  the  original  owner  of  the 
rich  island  of  Montreal.  No  one  knows  its  wealth  to 
day,  even  after  it  has  parted  with  many  of  its  fee-holds. 
It  still  holds  title  to  thousands  of  acres  and  no  one  save 
the  Gentleman  of  the  Corporation  of  St.  Sulpice,  them 
selves,  knows  the  wealth  of  the  institution.  To  say  that 
it  is  the  richest  ecclesiastical  institution  of  the  Americas 
is  not  enough,  for  here  is  an  organization  that  for  co 
herency,  wealth  and  strength  surpasses  Standard  Oil 
and  forms  the  chief  financial  support  of  the  strongest 
church  in  the  world." 

And  this  time  we  feel  that  our  acquaintance  of  the 
Place  d'Armes  is  not  by  any  chance  over-stepping  the 
mark.  In  the  quaint  little  Seminary  that  stands  in  the 
half -day  shadow  of  the  second  largest  church  on  the  con 
tinent  —  a  church  that  it  easily  builded  in  the  first  third 
of  the  nineteenth  century  from  its  accumulated  wealth 
—  there  centers  much  of  the  mystery  of  Montreal,  a 
mystery  which  to  the  stranger  takes  concrete  form  in  the 
high  walls  along  the  crowded  streets,  in  whispered  ru 
mors  of  this  force  or  that  working  within  the  politics 
of  the  city,  in  the  so-called  Nationalist  movement,  and 
flaunts  itself  in  rival  displays  of  Union  Jack  and  the 


326     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

historic  Tricolor  of  France.  There  is  little  of  mystery 
in  the  outer  form  of  the  Seminary.  The  quiet  folk  who 
live  within  those  very,  very  old  walls  are  hospitality  it 
self  —  even  though  their  ascetic  living  is  of  the  hardest, 
crudest  sort.  The  only  bed  and  carpeted  room  within 
the  building  is  reserved  for  the  occasional  visits  of 
bishop,  or  even  higher  church  authority.  But  hidden 
from  the  street  by  the  earliest  part  of  the  Seminary  — 
almost  unchanged  since  its  erection  in  1710  —  and  en 
closed  by  a  quadrangle  of  the  fortress-like  stone  build 
ings  of  the  institution,  is  a  most  delicious  garden  with 
old-fashioned  summer  flowers  and  quaint  statues  of 
favored  saints  set  in  its  shaded  place.  We  remember  a 
garden  of  the  same  sort  at  the  mission  of  Santa  Bar 
bara,  in  California.  These  two  are  the  most  satisfac 
tory  gardens  that  we  have  ever  seen.  And  it  is  from  the 
rose-bushes  in  the  Seminary  of  Montreal  that  one  gets 
a  full  idea  of  the  size  and  beauty  of  the  exterior  of  the 
parish  church  of  Notre  Dame.  Like  so  many  of  the 
cathedrals  of  Europe,  it  is  so  set  as  to  have  no  satis 
factory  view-point  from  the  street. 

And  yet  Notre  Dame  is  one  of  the  most  satisfying 
churches  that  we  have  ever  seen.  It  is  not  alone  its  size, 
not  alone  its  wonderfully  appropriate  location  facing  that 
historic  Place  d'Armes,  not  any  one  of  the  interesting 
details  of  the  great  structure  that  comes  to  us,  so  much 
as  the  thing  which  the  parish  church  typifies  —  the  intact 
keeping  of  the  customs,  the  language  and  the  faith  of  a 
folk  who  were  betrayed  and  deserted  by  their  mother 
land,  more  than  a  century  and  a  half  ago.  One  rarely 
hears  the  word  of  English  spoken  in  the  shadowy  and 
worshipful  aisles  of  Notre  Dame.  It  is  the  babbling 
French  that  is  the  language  of  three-quarters  of  the  resi 
dents  of  Montreal. 

For  there  stands  French,  not  only  entrenched  in  the 
chief  city  of  England's  chief  possession,  but  a  language 


MONTREAL  327 

that,  in  the  opinion  of  unprejudiced  observers,  gains 
rather  than  loses  following  each  twelvemonth.  There 
are  reasons  back  of  all  this,  and  many  of  them  too  com 
plicated  and  involved  to  be  entered  upon  'here.  Suffice 
it  to  say  here  and  now  that  the  city  school  taxes  are  di 
vided  pro  rata  between  Protestants  and  Roman  Catholics 
for  the  conduct  of  their  several  schools  of  every  sort. 
And  that  in  most  of  the  Catholic  schools  French  is  prac 
tically  the  only  language  taught,  a  half-hour  a  day  being 
sometimes  given  to  English,  whenever  it  is  taught  at  all. 
The  devotion  of  these  French  Canadians  to  their  lan 
guage  is  only  second  to  their  religion,  and  is  closely  inter 
mingled  with  it.  There  is  something  pathetic  and  lov 
able  about  it  all  that  makes  one  understand  why  the 
habitant  of  a  little  town  below  Montreal  tore  down  the 
English  sign  that  the  Dominion  government  erected  over 
their  Post  Office,  a  year  or  so  ago.  And  the  Dominion 
government  took  the  hint,  made  no  fuss,  but  replaced 
its  error  with  a  French  sign.  Remember  that  there  are 
more  Tricolors  floating  in  lower  Canada  than  British 
Union  Jacks. 

The  signs  of  Montreal  point  the  truth.  Half  of  the 
street  markers  must  be  in  English,  half  in  French,  just 
as  the  city  government  that  places  them  divides  its  pro 
ceedings,  half  in  one  language,  half  in  the  other.  This 
even  division  runs  to  the  street  car  transfers  and  notices, 
the  flaring  bulletins  on  sign-boards  and  dead-walls,  even 
so  stolid  a  British  institution  as  the  Harbor  Commis 
sioners  giving  the  sides  of  its  brigade  of  dock  loco 
motives  evenly  to  the  rival  tongues. 

To  attend  high  mass  in  Notre  Dame  is  to  make  a 
memory  well-nigh  ineffaceable.  It  is  to  bring  back  in 
future  years  recollections  of  a  great  church,  lifted  from 
its  week-day  shadows  by  a  wealth  of  dazzling  incandes- 
cents,  to  be  ushered  past  silent,  kneeling  figures  to  a 
stout  pew,  by  a  stout  Suisse  in  gaudy  uniform ;  to  look 


328     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

to  a  high  altar  that  stands  afar  and  ablaze  with  candles, 
while  priests  and  acolytes,  by  the  hundreds,  pass  before 
it  chanting,  and  the  Cardinal  sits  aloft  on  his  throne 
silent  and  in  adoration ;  to  hear  not  a  word  of  English 
from  that  high  place  or  the  folk  who  sit  upon  the  great 
floor  or  in  the  two  encircling  galleries,  but  to  catch  the 
refrain  of  chant  and  of  "  Te  Deum ;  "  these  are  the 
things  that  seem  to  make  religion  common  to  every  man, 
no  matter  what  his  professed  faith.  And  then,  after  it 
is  all  over,  to  come  out  of  the  shadows  of  the  parish 
church  into  the  brilliant  sunshine  of  the  Place  d'Armes, 
the  place  where  they  once  executed  murderers  under  the 
old  French  law  by  breaking  their  backs  and  then  their  les 
ser  bones,  and  to  hear  Gros  Bourdon  sing  his  chant  over 
the  city  from  the  belfry  of  Notre  Dame  —  this  is  the  old 
Montreal  living  in  the  heart  of  the  new.  They  do  not 
swing  the  great  bell  any  more  —  for  even  Notre  Dame 
grows  old  and  its  aged  stones  must  be  respected  —  but 
they  toll  it  rapidly,  in  a  sort  of  sing-song  chant.  We 
have  stood  in  the  west  end  of  the  town,  three  miles  dis 
tant  from  the  Place  d'Armes,  and  heard  the  rich,  sweet 
tones  of  his  deep  throat  come  booming  over  the  crowded 
city  —  a  warning  to  a  half  a  million  folk  to  turn  from 
worldier  things  to  the  thought  of  mighty  God. 

Our  best  path  leads  west  again  from  the  Place  d'Armes, 
past  the  newly  reconstructed  General  Post  Office,  more 
stately  banks  here  concentrating  the  wealth  of  the  strong, 
new  Canada;  smart  British-looking  shops  and  restau 
rants.  In  these  last  you  may  drink  fine  ales,  munch  at 
rare  cheeses,  of  which  Montreal  is  connoisseur,  and  eat 
rare  roast  beef  done  to  a  turn,  with  Yorkshire  pudding, 
six  days  in  a  week.  But  you  will  look  in  vain  for  real 
French  restaurants  with  their  delectable  cuisines.  We 
have  looked  in  vain  in  our  almost  innumerable  trips  to 
the  city  under  the  mountain.  We  have  enlisted  our 


MONTREAL  329 

friend  Paul,  who  avers  that  he  knows  Montreal  as  he 
knows  the  ringers  on  his  hand.  Paul  is  a  reporter  on  a 
French  paper.  He  works  not  more  than  fourteen  con 
secutive  hours  on  dull  days,  at  a  princely  salary  of  nine 
dollars  a  week,  and  the  rest  of  the  time  he  is  our  enter 
tainment  committee  —  and  an  immense  success  at  that. 
Paul  has  taught  us  a  smattering  of  Montreal  French, 
and  he  has  shown  us  many  curious  places  about  the  old 
city,  but  he  has  never  found  us  a  French  restaurant  that 
could  even  compare  with  some  we  know  in  the  vicinity 
of  West  Twenty-seventh  street  in  the  city  of  New  York. 
Sometimes  he  has  come  to  us  with  mysterious  hints  of 
final  success  and  we  have  girded  our  loins  quickly  to  go 
with  him.  But  when  we  have  arrived  it  has  been  a  place 
white-fronted  like  the  dairy  lunches  off  from  Broadway, 
and  we  have  never  seen  one  of  them  without  the  listing 
of  breakfast  foods  from  Battle  Creek,  Michigan,  mince- 
pie  or  other  typical  dishes  from  the  States.  And  at 
Paul's  rarest  find  we  interviewed  Monsieur  le  proprie- 
taire,  only  to  have  the  dashing  news  that  he  had  once 
served  as  second  chef  in  the  old  Burnet  House,  in 
Cincinnati.  There  is,  after  all,  a  closer  bond  between 
two  neighboring  nations  than  either  Ottawa  or  London 
is  willing  to  admit  and  even  Paul,  loyal  to  his  language 
and  to  his  traditions,  admits  that. 

"  Some  day  —  some  day,"  he  dreams  to  us  between 
cigarettes,  "  I  am  going  down  to  see  the  Easter  parade 
on  Fifth  avenue.  Last  year  twelve  thousand  went  from 
Montreal  " —  he  chuckles  — "  and  folks  from  Bordeaux 
ward  looked  at  the  swells  from  Westmount  and  thought 
they  were  real  New  Yorkers." 

And  a  little  while  later,  between  another  change  of 
cigarettes,  he  adds: 

"  And  I  may  not  come  back  on  my  ticket.  I  under 
stand —  that  reporters  get  fifteen  or  twenty  dollars  a 
week  on  the  New  York  city  papers," 


330     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Paul's  collar  is  impossible  and  his  appetite  for  ciga 
rettes  fiendish,  but  he  has  ambitions.  Perhaps  he  shares 
the  ambitions  of  the  city  which,  old  in  heart  and  tradi 
tions,  is  new  in  enterprise  and  hope,  and  looks  forward 
to  being  the  mighty  gateway  of  the  greatest  of  all  Eng 
lish  great  possessions  —  a  city  filled  with  more  than  a 
million  folk. 

We  pass  through  the  splendors  of  Victoria  square  and 
up  the  steep  turn  of  Beaver  Hall  Hill  into  Phillips 
square  and  smart  Ste.  Catherine  street.  In  a  general 
way,  the  French  element  have  preempted  the  eastern 
end  of  the  city  for  themselves,  while  the  English-speak 
ing  portion  of  the  population  clings  to  the  section  north 
and  west  of  Phillips  square  and  Ste.  Catherine  street 
right  up  to  the  first  steep  slopes  of  Mount  Royal.  This 
part  of  the  city  looks  like  any  smart,  progressive  British 
town  —  with  its  fine  Gothic  Cathedral  of  the  Church  of 
England  facing  its  showy  main  street,  its  exclusive  clubs 
and  its  great  hotels.  And  nowadays  smart  modern  res 
taurants  are  also  crowding  upon  Ste.  Catherine  street, 
for  modern  Montreal  will  proudly  tell  you,  and  tell  you 
again  and  again,  that  it  is  more  continental,  far  more 
continental  than  London,  which  in  turn  is  tightly  bound 
down  by  the  traditions  of  English  conservatism.  Mon 
treal  is  not  very  literary  —  Toronto  surpassing  it  in  that 
regard  —  but  it  has  a  keen  love  of  good  paintings,  good 
art  of  every  sort.  It  ranks  itself  next  to  New  York  and 
Boston  and  among  North  American  cities  in  this  regard. 

"  We  are  more  proud  of  our  public  and  private  gal 
leries,"  says  the  citizen  of  the  town  who  sips  tea  at  five 
o'clock  with  you  in  the  lounge  of  the  Windsor,  "  than 
we  are  of  our  New  Yorkish  restaurants  that  have  im 
ported  themselves  across  the  line  within  the  past  year  or 
two.  We  have  smiled  at  our  daughters  drifting  in  here 
for  their  tea  on  matinee  afternoons,  but  dinners  and 


MONTREAL  331 

American  cocktails  —  well  there  are  some  sorts  of  re 
ciprocity  that  we  decidedly  do  not  want." 

We  understand.  Montreal  wants  her  personality,  her 
rare  and  varied  personality,  preserved  inviolate  and  in 
tact.  That  is  one  great  reason  why  she  has  cherished 
the  pro-British  habits  of  her  press.  New  York  is  well 
enough  for  a  trip  —  Montreal  delights  in  our  metropo 
lis,  as  she  does  in  our  Atlantic  City  —  as  mere  pleasure 
grounds,  and  the  Easter  hegira,  in  which  Paul  is  yet  to 
join,  grows  each  year.  But  New  York  is  New  York, 
and  Montreal  must  be  Montreal.  With  her  wealth  of 
tradition,  her  peculiarly  unique  conservatism  of  two  lan 
guages  and  two  great  peoples  working  out  their  prob 
lems  in  common  sympathy,  without  conceding  a  single 
heritage,  one  to  the  other,  the  city  of  the  gray  and  green 
must  keep  to  her  own  path. 


22 

THE  CITY  THAT  NEVER  GROWS  YOUNG 

HE  stands,  hat  in  hand,  facing  the  city  that  honors 
his  memory  so  greatly.  To  Samuel  de  la  Cham- 
plain  Quebec  has  not  merely  given  the  glory  of  what 
seems  to  us  to  be  one  of  the  handsomest  monuments  in 
America,  but  here  and  there  in  her  quiet  streets  she 
brings  back  to  the  stranger  within  her  walls  recollections 
of  the  doughty  Frenchman  who  braved  an  unknown  sea 
to  find  a  site  for  the  city,  which  for  more  than  three 
hundred  years  has  stood  as  guardian  to  the  north  portal 
of  America.  Other  adventurous  sea  spirits  of  those  early 
days  went  chiefly  in  the  quest  of  gold.  Champlain  had 
loftier  ambitions  within  his  heart.  He  hoped  to  be  a 
nation-builder.  And  not  only  Quebec,  but  the  great 
young-old  nation  that  stands  behind  her,  is  his  real  monu 
ment. 

Still,  the  artist's  creation  of  bronze  and  of  marble  is 
effective  —  not  alone,  as  we  have  already  said,  because 
of  its  own  real  beauty  —  but  also  very  largely  because 
of  its  tremendously  impressive  setting  at  the  rim  of  the 
upper  town  —  facing  the  tiny  open  square  that  as  far 
back  as  two  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago  was  the  center 
of  its  fashionable  life.  Champlain  in  bronze  looks  at 
the  tidy  Place  d'Armes  —  older  residents  of  Quebec  still 
delight  in  calling  it  the  Ring  —  with  its  neat  pathways 
of  red  brick  and  its  low,  splashing  fountain,  as  if  he 
longed  to  return  to  flesh  and  blood  and  walk  through  the 
little  square  and  from  it  down  some  of  the  narrow  streets 
that  he  may,  himself,  have  planned  in  the  days  of  old. 

332 


QUEBEC  333 

Or  perhaps  he  would  have  chosen  that  once  imposing 
main  thoroughfare  of  Upper  Town,  St.  Louis  street, 
which  out  beyond  the  city  wall  has  the  even  more  dis 
tinctive  French  title  of  the  Grande  Alice.  We  have 
chosen  that  main  street  many  times  ourselves,  leading 
straight  past  the  castellated  gateways  of  the  Chateau, 
fashioned  less  than  a  score  of  years  ago  by  a  master 
American  architect  —  Mr.  Bruce  Price  —  and  since 
grown  very  much  larger,  quite  like  a  lovely  girl  still  in 
her  teens.  On  the  other  side  of  the  street,  close  to  the 
curb  of  the  Place  d'Armes,  is  the  ever-waiting  row  of 
Victorias  and  caleches,  whose  drivers  rise  smilingly 
in  their  places  even  at  the  mere  suggestion  of  a  coming 
fare.  Beyond  these  patient  Jehus  stands  the  rather  or 
dinary  looking  Court  House,  somewhat  out  of  harmony 
with  the  architectural  traditions  of  the  town  —  and  then 
we  are  plunged  into  the  heart  of  as  fascinating  a  street 
as  one  may  hope  to  see  in  North  America.  It  is  clean 
—  immaculate,  if  you  please,  after  the  fashion  of  all 
these  habit ans  of  lower  Canada  —  and  it  is  bordered 
ever  and  ever  so  tightly  by  a  double  row  of  clean-faced 
stone  houses,  their  single  doors  letting  directly  upon  the 
sidewalk,  and,  also  after  the  fashion  of  all  Quebec,  sur 
mounted  by  steep  pitched  tin  roofs  and  wonderfully  fat 
chimneys,  covered  with  tin  in  their  turn.  Quebec  seems 
to  have  a  passion  for  tin.  It  is  her  almost  universal 
roofing,  and  in  the  bright  sunshine,  glittering  with  mirror- 
like  brilliancy  of  contrast  against  the  age-darkened 
stone  walls,  it  has  a  charm  that  is  quite  its  own. 

One  of  these  old  houses  of  St.  Louis  street  sets 
well  back  from  the  sidewalk  in  a  seeming  riotous  waste 
of  front  lawn,  and  bears  upon  its  face  a  tablet  denoting 
it  as  the  one-time  home  of  the  Duke  of  Kent.  This  dis 
tinguished  gentleman  lived  in  Quebec  many  years  before 
he  became  father  of  Queen  Victoria.  In  fact,  Quebec 
remembers  him  as  a  rather  gay  young  blade  of  a  fellow 


334     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

who  had  innumerable  mild  affairs  with  the  fascinating 
French-Canadian  girls  of  the  town.  These  things  have 
almost  become  traditions  among  the  older  folk  of  the 
place.  Those  girls  of  Quebec  town  seem  always  to  have 
held  keen  attractions  for  young  blades  from  afar.  When 
you  turn  down  Mountain  Hill  and  pass  the  General 
Post  Office  with  its  quaint  Golden  Dog  set  in  the  fagade, 
they  will  not  only  make  you  re-read  that  fascinating  ro 
mance  of  the  old  Quebec,  but  they  will  tell  you  that 
years  after  the  Philiberts  and  the  Repentignys  were  gone 
and  the  English  were  in  full  enjoyment  of  their  rare 
American  prize,  that  same  old  inn,  upon  whose  front 
the  gnawing  dog  was  so  securely  set,  was  run  by  one 
Sergeant  Miles  Prentice,  whose  pretty  niece,  Miss  Simp 
son,  so  captivated  Captain  Horatio  Nelson  of  His  Maj 
esty's  Ship  Albemarle  that  it  became  necessary  for 
his  friends  to  spirit  away  the  future  hero  of  Trafalgar 
to  prevent  him  from  marrying  her. 

Beyond  the  old  house  of  the  Duke  of  Kent,  St.  Louis 
street  is  a  narrow  path  lined  by  severe  little  Canadian 
homes  all  the  way  to  the  city  gate.  Many  of  these 
houses  are  fairly  steeped  in  tradition.  One  tiny  fellow 
within  which  the  ancient  profession  of  the  barber  still 
works  is  the  house  wherein  Montcalm  died.  And  to  an 
other,  Benedict  Arnold  was  taken  in  that  ill-starred 
American  attack  upon  Quebec.  A  third  was  a  gift  two 
centuries  ago  by  the  Intendant  Bigot  to  the  favored 
woman  of  his  acquaintance.  Romance  does  creep  up 
and  down  the  little  steps  of  these  little  houses.  They 
change  hardly  at  all  with  the  changing  of  the  years. 

Here  among  them  are  the  ruins  of  an  old  theater  — 
its  solid-stone  facade  still  holding  high  above  the  narrow 
run  of  pavement.  It  has  been  swept  within  by  fire  — 
the  evil  enemy  that  has  fallen  upon  Quebec  again  and 
again  and  far  more  devastatingly  than  even  the  cannon 
that  have  bombarded  her  from  unfriendly  hands. 


QUEBEC  335 

"  Are  they  going  to  rebuild  ?  "  you  may  inquire,  as  you 
look  at  the  stolid  shell  of  the  old  theater. 

"  Bless  you,  no,"  exclaims  your  guide.  "  The  Music 
Hall  was  burned  more  than  a  dozen  years  ago.  Quebec 
does  not  rebuild." 

But  he  is  wrong.  Quebec  does  rebuild,  does  progress. 
Quebec  progresses  very  slowly,  but  also  very  surely. 
To  a  man  who  returns  after  twenty  years'  absence  from 
her  quiet  streets,  the  changes  are  most  apparent.  There 
are  fewer  caleches  upon  the  street  —  those  quaint  two- 
wheeled  vehicles  which  merge  the  joys  of  a  Coney  is 
land  whirly-coaster  and  the  benefits  of  Swedish  massage 
—  although  the  drivers  of  these  distinctive  carriages  still 
supply  the  American's  keen  demand  for  "  local  color  "  by 
shouting  "  marche  done "  to  their  stout  and  ugly  little 
horses  as  they  go  running  up  and  down  the  steep  side- 
hill  streets.  Nowadays  most  tourists  eschew  the  caleche 
and  turn  towards  trolley  cars.  That  of  itself  tells  of 
the  almost  sinful  modernization  of  Quebec.  It  is  almost 
a  quarter  of  a  century  since  the  electric  cars  invaded  the 
narrow  streets  of  the  Upper  Town,  and  in  so  doing 
caused  the  wanton  demolition  of  the  last  of  the  older 
gates  —  Porte  St.  Jean.  The  destruction  of  St.  Jean's 
gate  was  a  mistake  —  to  put  the  matter  slightly.  It 
came  at  a  time  when  the  question  was  being  gently  raised 
of  the  replacement  of  the  older  gates  that  had  gone  long 
before  —  Palace,  Hope  and  Prescott.  Nowadays  but  two 
of  these  portals  remain,  the  St.  Louis  and  the  Kent 
gates,  and  these  are  not  in  architectural  harmony  with 
the  solid  British  fortifications. 

Indeed,  that  is  one  of  the  great  crimes  to  be  charged 
against  the  modernization  of  Quebec.  Other  old  towns 
in  America  have  brought  their  architects  to  a  clever 
sense  of  the  necessity  of  making  their  newer  buildings  fit 
in  absolute  harmony  with  the  older.  They  have  clung 
jealously  to  their  architectural  personality.  Quebec  has 


336     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

missed  that  point.  With  the  exception  of  the  lovely  Cha 
teau  which  fits  the  traditions  of  the  town,  as  a  solitaire 
fits  a  ring  setting,  the  newer  buildings  represent  a 
strange  hodge-podge  of  ideas. 

Quebec  herself  rather  endures  being  quaint  than  en 
joys  it;  for  in  this  day  of  Canadian  development  she  has 
dreamed  of  the  future  after  the  fashion  of  those  insist 
ent  towns  further  to  the  west.  It  has  not  been  pleasant 
for  her  to  drop  from  second  place  in  Canadian  commer 
cial  importance  to  fourth  or  fifth.  She  has  had  to  sit 
back  and  see  such  cities  as  Winnipeg,  for  instance,  come 
from  an  Indian  trading-place  to  a  metropolitan  center 
two  or  three  times  her  size,  while  her  own  wharves  rot. 
It  is  a  matter  of  keen  humiliation  to  the  town  every  time 
a  big  ocean  liner  goes  sailing  up  the  river  to  Montreal  — 
her  river,  if  you  are  to  give  ear  to  the  protests  of  her 
citizens  whom  you  meet  along  the  Terrace  of  a  late 
afternoon  —  without  halting  at  her  wharves,  perhaps 
without  even  a  respectful  salute  to  the  town  which  has 
been  known  these  many  years  as  the  Gibraltar  of 
America. 

So  she  has  given  herself  to  the  development  of  trans 
continental  railroad  projects.  When  one  Canadian  rail 
road  decided  to  use  her  as  the  summer  terminal  of  its 
largest  trans-Atlantic  liners  without  sending  those  great 
vessels  further  up  to  Montreal,  Quebec  saw  quickly  what 
that  meant  to  her  in  prestige  and  importance.  When 
the  railroads  told  her,  as  politely  as  they  might,  that 
they  could  not  develop  her  as  a  mighty  traffic  center  be 
cause  of  the  broad  arm  of  the  St.  Lawrence  which 
blocked  rail  access  from  the  South,  she  put  her  wits  to 
gether  and  set  out  to  bridge  that  arm  with  the  greatest 
cantilever  in  the  world.  The  fall  of  the  Quebec  bridge 
five  years  ago  with  its  toll  of  eighty  lives,  was  a  great 
blow  to  the  commercial  hopes  of  the  town.  But  they 
have  begun  to  arise  once  more.  The  wreckage  of  that 


QUEBEC  337 

tragedy  is  already  out  of  the  way  and  the  workmen  are 
trying  again,  placing  fresh  foundations  for  the  slender, 
far-reaching  span  that  is  going  to  mean  so  very  much  to 
the  portal  city  of  Canada. 

But  progress  has  not  robbed  Quebec  of  her  charm. 
It  seems  quite  unlikely  that  such  a  brutal  tragedy  shall 
ever  come.  They  may  come  as  they  did  a  year  or  two 
ago  and  tear  down  the  impressive  Champlain  market  — 
one  of  the  very  great  lions  of  the  Lower  Town  —  but 
they  do  not  understand  the  habitant  from  those  back 
country  villages  around  Quebec.  Progress  does  not 
come  to  those  obscure  communities  —  no,  not  even 
slowly.  The  women  still  gather  together  at  some  moun 
tain  stream  on  wash-days  and  cleanse  their  laundry  by 
placing  it  over  flat  rocks  by  the  waterside  and  pounding 
it  with  wooden  paddles,  there  are  more  barns  roofed 
with  thatch  than  with  shingles,  to  say  nothing  of  farms 
where  a  horse  is  an  unknown  luxury  and  men  till  the 
soil  much  as  the  soil  was  tilled  in  the  days  of  Christ. 
From  those  places  came  the  habitans  to  Champlain  mar 
ket —  within  my  memory  some  of  them  in  two-wheeled 
carts  drawn  by  great  Newfoundland  dogs  —  and  it  was 
a  gay  place  on  at  least  two  mornings  of  the  week.  One 
might  buy  if  one  pleased  —  bartering  is  a  fine  art  to  the 
French-Canadian  and  one  dear  to  his  soul  —  or  one 
might  pass  to  the  next  stall.  But  one  could  never  pass 
very  many  stalls,  with  their  bright  offerings  of  food 
stuffs  or  simple  wearing  apparels  alike  set  in  garniture  of 
the  brilliant  flowers  of  this  land  of  the  short  warm  sum 
mer. 

And  now  that  the  sturdy  Champlain  market  is  no 
more  —  literally  torn  apart,  one  stone  from  another  — 
a  few  of  these  folk  —  typical  of  a  North  American  race 
that  refuses  to  become  assimilated  even  after  whole  cen 
turies  of  patient  effort  —  still  gather  in  the  open  square 


338     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

that  used  to  face  the  market-house.  They  do  not  under 
stand.  There  are  only  a  few  of  them,  and  their  little 
shows  of  wares  are  still  individually  brave,  still  indi 
vidually  gay.  But  even  these  must  see  that  the  folk  with 
money  no  longer  come  to  them.  Perhaps  they  see  and 
with  stolid  French-Canadian  indifference  refuse  to  ac 
cept  the  fact.  Such  a  thing  would  be  but  characteristic 
of  a  folk,  who,  betrayed  and  forgotten  by  their  home 
land  for  a  little  more  than  one  hundred  and  fifty  years, 
still  cling  not  merely  to  their  religion,  but  to  traditions 
and  a  language  that  is  alien  to  the  land  that  shelters 
them.  In  Montreal  the  traveler  from  the  States  first 
finds  French  all  but  universal,  the  hardy  Tricolor  of 
France  flying  from  more  poles  than  boast  British  Union 
Jacks.  In  Quebec  that  feeling  is  intensified.  We 
hunted  through  the  shops  of  the  town  for  a  British 
standard,  and  in  vain.  But  every  one  of  the  obliging 
shop-keepers  was  quick  to  offer  us  the  flag  of  France. 
And  the  decorative  motif  of  the  modern  architecture  of 
new  Quebec  lends  itself  with  astonishing  frequency  to 
the  use  of  the  lilies  of  old  France. 

"  It  is  that  very  sort  of  thing  that  makes  Britain  the 
really  great  nation  that  she  is,"  an  old  gentleman  told  us 
one  afternoon  on  the  Terrace.  We  had  been  discussing 
this  with  him,  and  he  had  told  us  how  the  city  records 
of  Quebec  —  a  British  seaport  town  —  were  kept  in 
French,  how  even  the  legislative  proceedings  in  the  great 
new  parliament  building  out  on  the  Grande  Alice  beyond 
the  city  wall  were  in  that  same  prettily  flavored  tongue. 
"  Yes,  sir,"  he  continued,  "  we  may  have  a  King  that  is 
English  in  title  and  German  in  blood,  sir,  but  here  in 
Canada  we  have  one  who  through  success  and  through 
defeat  is  more  than  King  —  Sir  Wilfred  Laurier  —  our 
late  premier,  sir." 

We  liked  the  old  gentleman's  spunk.  He  was  typical 
of  the  old  French  blood  as  it  pulses  within  the  new 


QUEBEC  339 

France.  We  liked  the  old  gentleman,  too.  To  us  he 
was  as  one  who  had  just  stepped  from  one  of  Honore 
Balzac's  stories,  with  his  mustaches,  waxed  and  dyed 
into  a  drooping  perfection,  his  low-set  soft  hat,  his  vast 
envelope  of  a  faded  greatcoat,  his  cane  thrust  under  his 
arm,  as  Otis  Skinner  might  have  done  it.  We  had  first 
met  him  one  morning  coming  out  of  the  arched  gateway 
of  the  very  ancient  whitewashed  pile  of  the  Seminary; 
again  as  he  stepped  from  his  morning  devotions  out 
through  the  doorway  of  the  Basilica  into  the  sunlight  of 
what  was  once  the  market-square  of  the  Upper  Town  — 
after  that  many  more  times.  Finally  we  had  risked  a 
little  smile  of  recognition,  to  be  answered  by  the  salute 
courtly.  We  had  conquered.  We  knew  that  romance 
personified  was  close  to  him.  Perhaps  our  old  gentle 
man  was  an  army  man;  he  must  have  been  able  to  sit 
on  the  long  porch  of  the  Garrison  Club,  that  delectable 
and  afternoon-teable  place  that  looks  out  upon  the  trim 
grass-carpeted  court-yard,  and  tell  stories  at  least  as 
far  back  as  the  Crimea. 

"A  Frenchman?"  you  begin,  as  if  attacking  the  very 
substance  of  our  argument  of  romance,  "  fighting  the 
battles  of  the  English  Queen?" 

Bless  your  heart,  yes.  The  Frenchmen  of  lower  Can 
ada  have  never  hesitated  at  helping  England  fight  her 
battles.  Within  sixteen  years  after  their  own  disastrous 
defeat  before  the  walls  of  the  citadel  city  that  they  loved 
so  dearly,  they  were  fighting  alongside  of  their  con 
querors  to  hold  her  safe  from  the  attacks  of  the  tre 
mendously  brave,  and  half-fed  little  American  army 
which  ventured  north  through  the  fearful  rigors  of  a 
Canadian  winter,  hopelessly  to  essay  the  impossible. 

But  our  old  gentleman  was  not  a  soldier.  He  was  a 
seller  of  cheeses  in  St.  Roch  ward,  who  had  retired  in 
the  sunset  of  his  life.  He  knew  the  Quebec  of  the  days 
when  the  Parliament  house  stood  perched  at  the  ram- 


340     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

parts  at  the  Prescott  gate,  and  the  old  gateways  them 
selves  were  narrow  impasses  at  which  the  traffic  of  great 
carts  and  little  caleches  in  summer,  and  dancing,  splen 
did  sleighs  in  winter,  was  forever  fearfully  congested; 
he  could  tell  many  of  the  romances  that  still  linger  up 
this  street  and  down  that,  within  the  stout  walls  of  this 
house  or  in  the  sheltered  garden  of  some  nunnery  or 
half-hidden  home.  He  could  speak  English  well,  which, 
for  a  Frenchman  in  Quebec,  is  a  mark  of  uncommon 
education.  But,  best  of  all,  he  knew  his  Quebec.  He 
was  in  a  true  sense  the  old  Quebec  living  in  the  new. 

Even  among  the  cosmopolitan  folk  of  the  Terrace  in 
the  shady  late  afternoons,  you  could  recognize  him  as 
such.  He  was  apart  from  the  throng  —  a  motley  of 
bare-footed,  brown-cloaked  friars,  full-skirted  priests, 
white  nuns  and  gray  and  black,  red-coated  soldiers  from 
the  Citadel  to  give  a  sharp  note  of  color  to  the  great 
promenade  of  Quebec,  millionaires  real  and  would-be 
from  New  York,  tourists  of  every  sort  from  all  the 
rest  of  our  land,  funny  looking  English  folk  from  the 
yellow-funnelled  Empress,  which  had  just  pulled  in  from 
Liverpool  and  even  now  lay  resting  almost  under  the 
walls  of  old  Quebec  —  he  was  readily  distinguished. 
To  be  with  him  was,  of  itself,  a  matter  of  distinction. 

To  walk  the  staid  streets  of  the  fascinating  old  town 
with  him  was  a  privilege.  Always  the  excursion  led  to 
new  and  unexpected  turns ;  one  day  up  the  narrow  lane 
and  through  the  impressive  gates  of  the  Citadel,  where  a 
petty  officer  detained  our  American  cameras  and  as 
signed  us  to  a  mumbling  rear  private  for  perfunctory 
escort  around  the  old  place.  It  is  no  longer  tenanted 
by  British  troops.  The  last  of  these  left  forty  years  ago. 
These  red-coats  are  counterfeit;  raw-boned  boys  from 
Canadian  farms  being  put  through  their  military  paces 
by  a  distant  government  which  may  sometimes  overlook, 
but  not  always.  The  Citadel  as  a  military  work  is 


! 


QUEBEC  34i 

tremendously  out-of-date.  Even  as  it  now  stands,  it  is 
almost  a  century  old,  and  that  tells  the  story.  The  guns 
that  have  so  wide  a  sweep  and  so  exquisite  a  view  from 
the  ramparts  may  look  fear-inspiring,  but  the  ramparts 
are  of  stone  and  would  be  quickly  vulnerable  to  modern 
naval  ordnance. 

The  gun  that  is  unfailingly  shown  to  Americans  is  a 
small  field-piece  which  is  said  to  have  been  captured 
from  us  at  Bunker  Hill.  Whereupon  our  tourists,  with 
a  rare  gift  of  repartee,  always  exclaim: 

"  Ah,  you  may  have  the  gun,  but  we  have  the  hill !  " 
And  the  military  training  of  the  young  Canadian 
militiaman  is  so  perfect  that  he  smiles  politely  in  re 
sponse.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  there  is  no  record  of  the 
fact  that  the  gun  was  ever  taken  from  the  Americans, 
although  each  little  while  there  is  a  request  from  the 
States  for  its  return,  which  is  always  met  with  derision 
and  scorn  by  the  Canadians.  Politics  in  Our  Lady  of 
the  Snows  is  almost  entirely  beyond  the  understanding 
of  an  American. 

Sometimes  our  friend  of  old  Quebec  led  us  to  the 
churches  of  the  town  —  many  of  them  capped  with 
roosters  upon  their  steeples,  instead  of  the  Roman  cross 
which  we  had  believed  inevitable  with  the  Catholic 
church.  Since  then  we  have  been  informed  that  many  of 
the  Swiss  churches  of  the  same  faith  have  that  high- 
perched  cock  upon  the  steeple-tops.  We  paused  once 
at  a  new  church  on  the  rim  of  the  town,  where  the  very 
old  habit  of  having  a  nun  in  constant  adoration  of  the 
Host  is  perpetuated,  paused  again  at  the  ever  fascinating 
Notre  Dame  des  Victoiries  in  Lower  Town,  with  its 
battlemented  altar  and  its  patriotic  legends  in  French, 
which  a  British  government  has  been  indulgent  enough  to 
overlook,  stood  again  and  again  at  the  wonderful  Van 
Dyke  which  hangs  in  the  clear,  cool,  white  and  gold 


342      PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

Basilica.  From  the  churches,  we  sometimes  went  to  the 
chapels;  the  modern  structure  of  the  Seminary,  or  the 
fascinating  holy  places  of  the  Ursulines,  where  the  kind- 
hearted  Mother  Superior  turned  our  attention  from  the 
imprisoned  nuns  chanting  their  prayers  behind  an  altar 
screen,  like  the  decorous  and  constant  hum  of  honey 
bees,  to  the  skull  of  Montcalm.  Then  we  must  see  his 
burial  place  in  the  very  spot  in  the  chapel  wall  cleft 
open  by  a  rampant  British  shell  sent  to  harass  his  army. 

"  Montcalm,"  said  our  gentleman  of  the  old  Quebec. 
"  He  was,  sir,  the  bravest  soldier  and  the  finest  that 
France  ever  sent  overseas." 

And  we  could  only  remember  that  other  fine  monu 
ment  of  Quebec,  out  on  the  Grande  Alice  toward  the 
point  where  Abraham  Martin's  cows,  chewing  their 
cuds  on  an  open  plain,  awoke  one  day  to  find  one  of  the 
world's  great  battles  being  fought  —  almost  over  their 
very  heads.  In  that  creation  of  marble  and  of  bronze, 
the  great  figure  of  Fame  is  perched  aloft,  reaching  down 
to  place  her  laurel  branch  upon  a  real  French  gentleman 
—  Montcalm  —  at  the  very  hour  of  his  death.  That  me 
morial  is  something  more.  In  a  fashion  somewhat  un 
usual  to  monuments,  it  fairly  vitalizes  reality. 

There  must  be  a  real  reason  why  Quebec  is  such  a 
Mecca  for  honeymoon  journeys.  You  can  see  the 
grooms  and  the  brides  out  on  the  Terrace,  summernight 
after  summernight.  Romance  hovers  over  that  high- 
hung  place.  It  sometimes  saunters  there  of  a  sunshiny 
morning  —  a  couple  here,  or  a  couple  there  in  seemingly 
loving  irresponsibility  as  to  the  fact  that  ours  is  a  work 
aday  world,  after  all.  It  lingers  at  the  afternoon  tea, 
along  the  Terrace  promenade.  It  comes  into  its  own, 
night  after  night,  when  the  boys  and  girls  of  the  town 
promenade  back  and  forth  to  the  rhythmical  crash  of  a 


QUEBEC  343 

military  band,  or  in  the  intervals  stand  at  the  rail  looking 
down  at  the  rough  pattern  of  street-lights  in  Lower 
Town,  the  glistening  string  of  electrics  at  Levis,  or  listen 
ing  to  the  rattle  of  ship's  winches  which  give  a  hint  that, 
after  all,  there  is  a  world  beyond  Quebec. 

When  night  comes  upon  the  Terrace,  one  may  see  it 
at  its  very  best.  He  may  watch  the  day  die  over  the 
Laurentians,  the  western  sky  fill  with  pink  afterglow, 
and  the  very  edge  of  those  ancient  peaks  sharpen  as  if 
outlined  with  an  engraver's  steel.  For  a  moment,  as  the 
summer  day  hesitates  there  on  the  threshold  of  twilight 
and  good-by,  he  may  trace  the  country  road  that  runs 
its  course  along  the  north  bank  of  the  St.  Lawrence 
by  the  tiny  homes  of  the  habitans  that  line  it,  he  may 
raise  his  eyes  again  to  the  sharp  blue  profile  of  the 
mountains.  He  may  hear,  as  we  heard,  the  old  gentle 
man  from  St.  Roch,  whisper  as  he  raises  his  pointing 
cane: 

"  I  come  here  every  night  and  look  upon  the  amphi 
theater  of  the  gods." 

So  it  is  the  night  that  is  the  most  subtle  thing  about 
Quebec.  It  is  night  when  one  may  hear  the  bells  of  all 
the  churches  that  have  been  a- jangle  since  early  morning 
ring  out  for  vespers  before  the  many  altars,  the  sharp 
report  of  the  evening  gun  speaking  out  from  the  ram 
parts  of  the  Citadel.  After  that,  silence  —  the  silence 
of  waiting.  There  is  a  surcease  of  the  chiming  bells  — 
the  Terrace  becomes  deserted  of  the  army  of  pleasure- 
seekers  who  a  little  time  before  were  making  meaning 
less  rotation  upon  it,  the  bandmen  fall  asleep  in  their 
cell-like  casements  of  the  Citadel,  the  lights  of  Lower 
Town  and  of  Levis  go  snuffing  out  one  by  one.  Silence 
—  the  silence  of  waiting.  Only  the  sentinels  who  pace 
the  ramparts  of  the  crumbling  fortifications,  the  occa 
sional  policeman  in  the  narrow  street,  the  white-robed 


344     PERSONALITY  OF  AMERICAN  CITIES 

sister  who  sits  in  perpetual  adoration  of  the  Sacrament, 
proclaim  Quebec  awake.  Quebec  does  not  sleep.  She 
lives,  like  an  aged  belle  in  memory  of  her  triumphs  of 
the  past,  keeps  patiently  the  vigil  of  the  lonely  years,  and 
awaits  the  coming  of  Christ. 


THE   END 


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STAMPED  BELOW 


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RECALL 


dCO  Li.8M.rt 
OUE  JUN  8    1971 


APR  5 


LIBRARY,  UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  DAVIS 

Book  Slip-50m-12,'64(F772s4)458 


361947 

E168 
Hungerford,  E.         E93 

The  personality 
of  American  cities. 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF   CALIFORNIA 
DAVIS 


